While there are many, the main reason that VPN over Tor is attractive to Tor users is because of recaptchas.
If I find a site on Tor with Re-captcha, I instantly click out and give up. I’m not wasting 10 minutes clicking fire hydrants and motorcycles every time I want to submit data to a website, and that’s 10 minutes if you’re lucky. Even if you solve these Re-captcha’s perfectly, it still fails and asks you to go through an endless cycle of follow-ups. This happens because anyone can find the IP of Tor exit nodes. It’s also because of Tor users doing malicious stuff to harm websites, causing them to increase the difficulty.
The clear answer here is to use an IP address that is not known by the captcha systems to hide the fact that you’re on tor. When you try and research how to do this though, all of the answers that people give are don’t. So is that the answer? Just let captcha software destroy the Tor experience, deal with it and stick to websites that are privacy-centric or hosted on onion sites (which still have recaptcha’s at times; that’s another story though).
All of that’s just to say, what’s the approach to solving this problem if it’s not VPN over Tor? Spinning up a new Tor exit node using a VPS anytime you want to access a site and using that until it gets blacklisted? There needs to be something because the, “you just don’t” approach that I’m seeing everywhere is definitely not the way and is just going to lead to people using VPN over Tor.
If you do have to take the VPN over Tor approach, what’s the best way to implement it? Is ‘proxychains firefox’ the only way, because other than “you just don’t” it’s the only way that I’ve seen explained online.
While I probably should have before posting this, I am new to the forums and haven’t skimmed them yet. I see the answers being similar however.