Little Snitch anti-monitoring software is moving from Mac to Linux

Popular macOS app Little Snitch brought network monitoring tools to Linux this week. In a Blog post Announcing the launch, a developer at Objective Development shared some early results from using the app on Linux: “In Ubuntu, I found 9 system processes making connections to the Internet over the course of one week. On macOS, we counted over 100.”

While the Linux version of Little Snitch provides the same basic functionality for viewing and disabling unwanted connections, it’s not exactly the same. Objective Development says it’s “not a security tool,” unlike the macOS version.

According to Objective Development, Linux doesn’t automatically make applications more private – for example, they found Firefox, pre-installed on Ubuntu, connects to many different servers. The developers note that Firefox “still connects to some of these servers,” even after disabling advertising and tracking in the browser’s preferences. They added:

“Every application behaves almost the same way on all supported platforms. If you install Thunderbird, Visual Studio Code, or any other major player, expect the same kind of metrics you see on other platforms. However, I found one notable exception: LibreOffice. I only started LibreOffice Writer for testing, and it didn’t make any network connections at all! That’s unusual these days!”“

The Linux version of Little Snitch is Available now It is free and currently supports Linux distributions with kernel 6.12 or later.