Hello friends!
I made the switch from Windows back to Linux over the weekend, and so far almost everything is going swimmingly. Distro of choice is LMDE, and Steam and Proton are running like a dream.
I am having one minor issue which I’ve resolved in an unsatisfactory manner. Online games keep disconnecting frequently on loading new areas. This is occurring most noticeably on Guild Wars 2, Last Epoch, and Path of Exile.
I’ve resolved the issue by switching my DNS from my ISP default to Google’s 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8 service. No issues since the change.
So, this is not ideal since I’d like to break away from Google services for improved privacy. Are there any ethical DNS providers I can point to for reliable gaming, or are there any alternative solutions I should look into?
Whether the DNS service logs or not doesn’t really matter that much since your ISP can still log all your DNS requests and create an advertising profile based on them. DNS is both unencrypted and unauthenticated by default, so not only can your ISP see the requests, but they can also modify the responses.
If you want privacy, you really need to use DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TCP. The easiest way to do that is run AdGuard Home. It runs well on a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer. Your devices will still use regular DNS to the AdGuard Home server, but by default it uses DoH for its outbound requests.
Another solution is to use something like wireguard tunnel, where all your traffic is routed through the tunnel.
This also hides your DNS requests from anyone whose not allowed to and hasn’t access to your private key/wg0 configuration.