It may be a hardware issue as I've never had an issue like this with Proton on any computer before this, but then again it's also been a few updates since I've used Proton on Windows. Tried getting it on my relatively new laptop and every time I try to open it, my computer acts like I'm trying to make it load the entirety of Google at once. (By the way, that bit of tediousness continues at the login page and ince more after putting in my information [God help us if I miss a key on my password!])

When it finally loads into the application, my first instinct is to enable the kill-switch as I've always done. It tries to connect, goes unresponsive fir a few seconds, tries again, unresponsive, tries again unresponsive. This loop goes on for several minutes if left uninterrupted, but since this entire time Proton is taking so much of the computer's resources that Minesweeper would lag, I've only assumed this loop would be infinite after several minutes have resulted in no change and so much as clicking the window would cause it to pop up with the "Proton is not responding" dialog box asking me to close it. Naturally, once this dialog appears, the loop is done, it's not going to start responding at this point.

I've tried reinstalling, I've tried clicking the connect button instead of going straight to the kill switch, it makes absolutely no difference. Has anyone else had this problem? It's so weird to me because I've been using Proton for years on my computers and Android phones, so I know that generally speaking Proton is fantastic if you need impeccable security with no sacrifice to speed, but I also haven't been using Windows in some time and as such this is the first time I'm even seeing this new GUI layout. Does anyone know what could be causing the issue? If not, does anyone have alternative free VPNs I could try for the time being?