Apple's apps bypass firewalls like LittleSnitch and LuLu on macOS Big Sur

Background: I've written my own kernel extension that works in similar manner to Little Snitch, but does a lot more, including SSL MITM and on-demand packet capture, that I've been using for more than 10 years now.

It's a fact that Apple has continuously moved to lock down macOS in ways that are antithetical to folks that want full control over their operating system. To many of us that moved on from Linux on the desktop, the combination of a stable/uniform/attractive desktop environment with a Unix core that had great developer documentation -no longer the case!- and nicely-designed APIs was too much to resist. Unfortunately, the push towards consumers and Apple's increasingly one-sided my-way-or-the-highway approach (fueled by security concerns that to me are completely irrelevant, if not a huge annoyance and waste of time) means that a lot of us oldschool Unix hackers were left out in the cold.

I don't plan to upgrade past Mojave and at some point in the future I will move back to Linux.

I just moved from Macos to Linux. The Linux desktop experience has improved a lot in the past five years (at least KDE has).

Linux on the desktop and Linux on the laptop (heh) has definitely improved. It _sometimes_ needs a little tweaking to get it right, but KDE/Plasma also happens to offer that level of "tweakability" that should satisfy almost all semi-mainstream users (at least anyone coming from Windows or Mac).

Compared to my first Linux laptop (a Sony Vaio circa 2000), my current XPS 13 works as well as any Mac laptop I have ever owned, and all the hardware that you would "expect" to work (but probably didn't work as smoothly 10 or 20 years ago) Just Works (WiFi, external displays, excellent battery life/sleep, etc...)

Based on the complaints I have heard about Apple hardware and MacOS over the past few years, I'd even argue that Linux-on-the-desktop isn't any less stable or harder to get working than a Mac.