this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Portmaster is the most powerful GUI firewall out there.
The learning curve is steep and it is not a good fit for the filthy casual.
It has very good block lists... Too good.
For example, if you want to play a vidiya game esp online it will likely block half the connections so you need to go in manually unblock what's needed.
Ain't no normie ever gonna figure that out lol so I stopped telling people to get it.
It needs to have normie config IMHO
We were all 'normies', to use your vernacular, at one point or another. Could it possibly be more complicated than building an Altair with less than supportive instruction manuals of the time?
Touche but dropping kids in the deep end of the pool... Some of them drown π₯²
Yes, the filters are deadly eeficient, you can block global all tracking from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ms, but than you need to set what you will block exactly, if you block eg,Google globaly, forget to be capable to access any of its services, including YouTube. Globally I blocked only Facebook, because I don't use any of the Zuckerbot services and clicking on a Facebook link or any of it's other services or AIs, I see only this (and in change it's pixel or any other tracker or logger, embedded in any website, my middle finger)
Anyway, Portmaster is not so difficult in its settings or the learning curve, well, at least not for someone with minimal basic nocions, I found it pretty intuitive, way more complicated is to set up Pi-Hole, which is certainly nothing for noobs. Portmaster is installing as is and maybe selecting the DNS server you want use from the list, because it has good default settings which guarantee a reasonable privacy. Everything you block is easy restaurable if the result isn't what you want. No problems to recommend, because it's save to use and relativ easy to handle, even for newbies
All true but vast majority of people will never be bothered to be blocking/unblocking per connection, at best they will do per app and even that is a very small minority.
As said, Portmaster by default already has a good setting, a newbe don't have to do nothing to improve a lot his privacy, more than download, installing (run on boot) and forget about it. Grandmother safe.