Not any authoritative recommendations. I’m at most a casual user of VPNs, and so long as I see the traffic getting encrypted, don’t think about it much more.

I always hear Mullvad is great for maximizing privacy. Never tried them myself though.

Personally, I use Proton. I was prepping to jump ship earlier this year, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it. I’ve had a pretty decent experience with them. The only issue was on on a Linux machine…Uh…and it was minor enough and long ago enough that I don’t even remember what it was?

See above for my dissatisfying experience with Surf shark.

I did try to sign up with ExpressVPN many years ago. They’re payment portal was busted (tried every day for a week, emailed support with no response).

That about sums up my experience.