No, I don't remember a time when users were in control and actually owned Apple-made hard- and software.
However, linux is alive and well, despite some flavours attempting to force autoupdating snap stores and the like onto users.
However, linux is alive and well, despite some flavours attempting to force autoupdating snap stores and the like onto users.
The biggest pay-off for OpenSnitch is if you're going to be installing and using third-party programs like VSCode and Unity, who love to talk to analytics providers.
Isn't that enough?
If you found that your next door neighbor was sneaking into your house while you're away, and he said "oh I have an option not to do that. Just ask me not to any more." Would that be good enough? You say "ok I would like to invoke that option" and that's it, you happily go away on a month long vacation without installing any cameras or anything because they guy said he won't do that now.
That's a single package, whose setting affects no other apps, and you have to trust that the app even really does what it says, which makes no sense when the topic is apps that may be doing unwanted things behind your back.
Taking that further, you can ditch your Mac and switch to Linux or BSD if you're concerned about the article subject. In other words, you can sell your house and move if you don't like the direction the neighborhood is going with all the peeping toms about, but there's extra work involved in that solution so you have to decide if you can afford such a change for more privacy. So, you can sell your Mac and move your workflow to a less invasive OS on hardware you choose, but depending on how deep your workflow is intertwined with and relies upon the macOS ecosystem, that can be a ton of work as well.
The ideal solution seems to be to VPN off my home internet connection, but that just feels so broken...
I've thankfully only lost VPN access a handful of times since installing it because our internet is relatively stable.
For example, Fedora build is ruled by these principles: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1518, while the Mozilla build is not.
You need your tools goals to be aligned with your own, and reject any that aren't, not cater to them.
Working around the FF package by installing from elsewhere is no answer.
Otherwise be careful with Manjaro; it is a noble project with great goals and some great implementations (and a stellar community!), but they tend to go a bit overboard on customization for customization's sake which has introduced breakage in the past. Nothing that isn't fixed within a day in my experience, but stable it most certainly is not.
There's also Mint for a more traditional and conservative take on Ubuntu's method, as well as MX Linux which shows off how good Debian can be in the right hands.
Or go crazy like me and start using OpenBSD as your main workstation provided your workflow can adapt to it; I'm on 7.0 on this machine with Firefox 95 and literally everything I need is here.
This is my daily driver for both home and work. I've completely ditched Windows and other versions of Linux. Steam runs fine, and with Proton, I have compatibility good enough not to miss Windows at all. Some games (Dark Messiah is one) that won't even run in Windows anymore run great in Proton.
The company I work for does a lot of container-based work, and aside from a couple tweaks to apt sources that naively assume release names, everything "just works".
So, in conclusion, it shouldn't matter one bit how canonical decides to distribute firefox, if you can just use the debian based apt, or flatpak.
I hope canonical goes away from the snap model, because I've had nothing but issues with it, until I got fed up enough to remove it, and then everything was great again. Issues were mostly related to read-only mounted file system, and otherwise the mess it produces. However, even if I had experienced none of those, the whole automatic updates whether-you-like-it-or-not... is one of the reasons why I'm not using windows or macOS.
Not sure why are a singling out Apple here. Windows is worse as are many (most?) hardware vendors; there is a reason everyone REALLY should fresh install vanilla Windows over the vendors OEM version.