KNord

Screenshots

What it does

• Status at a glance Connection state, server, hostname, IP, technology and protocol, with live uptime and transfer counters.
• Locations Every country with flags, drill-down into cities, and the specialty groups — Double VPN, Onion Over VPN, P2P, Dedicated IP.
• All the settings Kill Switch, Threat Protection Lite, firewall, post-quantum encryption, auto-connect, Meshnet, LAN discovery and custom DNS.
• Allowlist Add and remove ports, port ranges and subnets without dropping to a terminal.
• System tray Optional. State at a glance and connect or disconnect without opening the window; closing then hides rather than quits.
• No extra privileges It drives the official nordvpn command line client, so nothing runs as root and there is no Electron runtime.

Getting started

Arch Linux

Download knord-*.pkg.tar.zst from the latest release, then:

sudo pacman -U knord-*.pkg.tar.zst

Debian / Ubuntu

Download knord_*.deb from the latest release, then:

sudo apt install ./knord_*.deb

Fedora / RPM-based distributions

Download knord-*.rpm from the latest release, then:

sudo dnf install ./knord-*.rpm

Install the official NordVPN client first: it supplies the required nordvpn command and system service.

Flatpak

Download knord.flatpak from the latest release, then:

flatpak install --user knord.flatpak
flatpak run io.github.timpalpant.knord

The Flatpak still needs the NordVPN client installed on the host: it is proprietary and depends on a systemd system service, so it cannot be bundled. KNord runs every command through flatpak-spawn --host, which is why the package asks for --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak. That is a broad permission, effectively host access; if you would rather not grant it, use the Arch package or build from source.

From source

git clone https://github.com/timpalpant/knord.git
cd knord
cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
sudo cmake --install build --prefix /usr

You will need Qt 6.5+, KDE Frameworks 6 and the NordVPN client, with your user in the nordvpn group. The full list is in the README.

How it talks to NordVPN

Everything goes through the official nordvpn CLI. Commands are serialized through a single queue, because the daemon does not handle concurrent clients well, and run with LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 so the output labels the parsers key off stay stable.

Connection status is polled every two seconds while the window is visible and every ten when it is hidden in the tray. After any change the app re-reads nordvpn status rather than trusting the output of the command it just ran.

Known limitations: Meshnet is exposed only as an on/off switch, and per-server selection and server load are not shown — the CLI does not report them.

Contributing

Bug reports and patches are welcome — see issues and pull requests. KNord is free software under the GPL-3.0-or-later.