they were all owned by the same company and sold to Kape, which has ties to the Israeli intelligence service, a few years back.
The issue is who he sold it to -- the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users' browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
I personally use perfect-privacy, which didn't turn up any red flags when I did research a few years ago. it's a little lacking in features but openvpn isn't that hard to set up on linux & android. no clue how well their desktop app works.
The old Pop! shell (I assume you're using the old one since last I checked the new one written in rust isn't ready to daily yet, hopefully soon though...) hasn't gotten any love in a long time, but I'm surprised you don't see it in Ubuntu. Here's what it looks like for me on Fedora:
what's weird is I see that on wifi connections but not VPN. On VPN I only get "Make available to other users". Maybe it's the openvpn integration specifically, as opposed to wireguard. I haven't checked ubuntu recently but I don't thiiiink I had it on 18.04/20.04
Oh that could be, I'll set up an openVPN connection later and see if it's any different.