Mikelius

For me, it’s just that I don’t want to have to turn the console on with plans to play for 1 hour only to be introduced to mandatory forced updates or show installation times that eat that entire hour away anyway. I just want to play my damn games, not to mention 100% offline if I so choose to.

I personally use mullvad for all outgoing traffic and then airvpn for any let forwarding I require. Basically airvpn is exclusive to incoming traffic, like my self hosted services or game servers, and then anything I do on the internet routes through mullvad. All setup through opnsense since they both support wireguard.

I always had issues with proton’s port forwarding being reliable in the past. That being said, if you need things like video streaming services, mullvad seems to be having a hard time with these recently where as proton worked well for me back when I used it (unsure if that’s still true).

Lots of comments already mentioning the differences. I have tried these, including the mentioned ipfire, and decided on the end to use opnsense plus openwrt on two different devices.

I chose opnsense at the time many years ago because it supported wireguard out of the box, where as pfsense required some weird install process I didn’t want to deal with. Plus I liked the UI to opnsense more.

My moden has been literally replaced by my firewall so I have the ONT connected to it and then use it to do all the heavy lifting for… Well, firewall stuff. It connects to a VPN so my entire network routes through the VPN. Then my openwrt device is connected to that. It also handles firewall stuff, but more at an internal level (keeping network devices only permitted to communicate with devices I say are okay, blocking internet access, etc) and also hosts my nginx setup to route to various servers.

While I could do everything on one machine with opnsense, I’ve got a particular setup that allows me to have multiple devices at the firewall level, truly isolated from the rest of my internal network (for a couple of internet open port services). And it gives me peace of mind that if someone found a zero day in opnsense, I’m not totally screwed unless they also got one in openwrt.

To answer “which is better to begin with”, I personally find opnsense way more flexible and robust than the other 2 options. Has a lot more capabilities and upgrading is super easy without requiring jumping through weird hoops and such like openwrt does.

Unless it’s my cat. Got heavily filtered water and use it to fill 3 different fountain bowls in different parts of the house (none near the food source, but I did that because if they are, she’ll eat her food over them…) and the cat still demands I turn the sink on instead. Same exact water, and even though I change her water out almost every other day, the sink wins. Just glad she hasn’t figured out how to turn it on yet…

Funny enough the last fountain I got looks like a faucet and she’s like “nah I’m not stupid, turn the sink on.”

I’ll have to check out TrackerControl, that’s a new one to me!

I have seen app manager but currently use AppOps. I didn’t recommend AppOps above because I’m not sure it’s still supported or not, and it’s also not really Foss. It’s treated me well over the years, but I’m definitely interested in finding a better alternative. The last time I checked app manager, it wasn’t as good… But maybe that’s changed as it’s been several years now so I think I might be due for looking at it again!

My wireguard connection on my phone connects to my home network to an pi hosting my internal VPN… But the network is completely covered by a mullvad VPN through opnsense. I’ve got pihole setup using the mullvad anti-trackkng private DNS. With this setup, the only real need I have for root on my phone is because I do some pretty low level automation on it through crond and some backups of core app data that I’d really hate to lose… And the complex firewall rules lol.

This is where rooting the phone is required. I use wireguard without root and have AFWall granted with root at bootup so it doesn’t require acting as a VPN

1. AFWall+ firewall to allow list apps to internet using your preferred method (e.g. VPN, wifi, data, etc)
2. PcapDroid to help monitor and analyze packets, or to just confirm things aren’t communicating unexpectedly
3. AdAway if you’re not using your own dedicated dns over a permanent VPN connection

If not all 3 of these, AFWall is probably the best to go with. Having a way to not only block Apps, but also define your own custom firewall rules is very powerful. For example, I redirect all DNS requests to my own DNS with a custom rule (for apps, like Termux, using hardcoded DNS lookups instead of what the phone is set to)

I totally thought because of how long the equals looked, it was multiple equals characters, not just >>= lol. That’s what got me confused. Don’t think these are things I’d personally use but each to their own preferences right xD

Omg the editor has regions??? Time to abuse this on a few files…

What is that weird >>=== symbol? Looks like a cross breed between C and JavaScript here.

I hate short variable names in general too, but am okay with them for iterators where i and j represent only indices, and when x/y/z represent coordinates (like a for loop going over x coordinates). In most cases I actually prefer this since it keeps me from having to think about whether I’m looking at an integer iterator or object/dictionary iterator loop, as long as the loop remains short. When it gets to be ridiculous in size, even i and j are annoying. Any other short names are a no go for me though. And my god, the abbreviations… Those are the worst.