firelizzard

That is a level of pedantry that I find pointless. Using the wrong word can lead to miscommunication. Omitting a comma can completely change the meaning of a sentence. Moving punctuation inside or outside of quotes? Makes no real difference.

The point is to communicate more effectively and efficiently and reduce miscommunication. Using the wrong word is a great way to be misunderstood, especially when communicating with people from other cultures.

MarkMarine, the person you responded to, is the original commenter. I agree with your point but clearly MarkMarine has no interest in learning how to communicate well.

Little Snitch requires packet inspection. If you ran it in a Linux VM, it will inspect packets within the VM. So... kind of useless for monitoring connections on the host.

You're correct, but for a bit more context: The macOS kernel is XNU, which is derived from/based on the Mach kernel, but heavily modified. The kernel itself is open source but some drivers/kernel extensions are not so it's not actually usable (unless you provide your own implementations of those).

An operating system is roughly broken into three parts: the kernel, the core system tools, and the shell (the desktop environment and/or the CLI shell). Linux: Linux kernel, GNU coreutils (usually), KDE/Gnome/etc + CLI shells. macOS: XNU, BSD userland + launchd/etc, Aqua/Cocoa. Windows: NT kernel, Win32/WinRT/etc, Windows Shell.

The systems LittleSnitch uses to do packet inspection are very much OS-specific. There's no generic standard for doing high-performance packet inspection. XNU and Linux are *very* different kernels. Linus Torvalds built Linux from scratch as a monolithic kernel because he wanted a Unix-like OS that wasn't encumbered. XNU is based on the Mach microkernel though XNU is a hybrid or monolithic kernel, not a microkernel. The point is, they have very different heritage and very different systems for... well pretty much everything. So "just *nix under the hood" is kind of true but also completely besides the point as far as packet inspection goes. And even then, while there are a lot of similarities between the core system tools of Linux and macOS, they're still quite different and unless you're limiting yourself to POSIX-standard interfaces (which are only a fraction of the system), you're not going to be able to use the same code on both systems.