LittleSnitch for Linux

Re:LittleSnitch for Linux by moduspol on Thursday April 09, 2026 @08:02AM (#47702555)

I used Little Snitch on Mac a few years ago and liked it, though I wasn't a fan of how (necessarily) deep it had to be in the OS to work. It felt like one of those things where, the moment you have any kind of network connectivity issue, it's the first thing you need to disable to troubleshoot because it's the weirdest thing you're doing.

I guess what I'd really like is a middleware box or something that I could put on my home network, but would then still give the same user experience as the normal app. I don't want to have to log into some web interface and manually add firewall rules after I find something not working. I like the pop-ups that tell you exactly when you're trying to do something that is blocked, and allow you to either add a rule or not.

I'm probably straddling some gray area between consumer-focused and enterprise-focused feature sets, but it would be neat.

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Re:LittleSnitch for Linux by halfcat on Thursday April 09, 2026 @08:20AM (#47702744)

I’ve also wanted something like this. The challenge is with an external appliance you lose awareness of which process is initiating the request.

This is solvable to some degree but requires varying degrees of new complexity depending how smooth of a user experience you’re aiming for.

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Re:LittleSnitch for Linux by vanc_cefepime on Thursday April 09, 2026 @08:32AM (#47702854)

I am the same, used Little Snitch for a few years back in the late 2000s, I think like 2010 until a few years back when I moved fulltime to Linux. Back then, my parents had an iMac and I was the designated "IT" person to keep it running efficiently. My siblings had a bad habit of installing games and hack software on it for their games. I ended up purchasing a license and after the first few hours/days of configuring allow/block lists, it worked pretty well. It earned the label of "Little B*ch" from them since it would stop their gaming hacking apps from connecting and wrecking havoc. Eventually I learned to keep them on a standard user account and separate admin for installing software.

Long story you didn't ask for. Like I said, I haven't used Little Snitch in a while. I'll give this a whirl this weekend. What I have done over the past few years is run AdGuard Home on a min home server. This has helped keep ads undercontrol in our hoursehold and I have an easy "turn off adguard for 10 mins" in homeassistant for the wife so she can do some shopping online since it can occasionally break some sites, but overall they tolerate adguard and think it's a good middle ground. I have a few block lists, nothing too crazy or strict to avoid breaking most sites. On the desktops/laptops, they all run FireFox w uBlock origin.

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Re:LittleSnitch for Linux by dyauspitr on Thursday April 09, 2026 @09:01AM (#47703167)

How deep it was in the OS was exactly what I liked about it. I only wished it were open source so I know what exactly is happening with that level of access.

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Re:LittleSnitch for Linux by littlesnitch on Friday April 10, 2026 @06:39AM (#47716055)

An external appliance does not have access to your process table, so it can't tell you which process originated the request. Only which device.

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