Little Snitch is literally used for blocking ads as well as other network traffic. My main point was that you don’t have to use it for blocking the other traffic, because Linux systems won’t have unwanted traffic to begin with, since you have full control over it. And for the ad part, there’s better solutions than network-level filtering if you have control over your browser.

So is it more that you don’t know what I’m talking about or that you don’t want to, for whatever reason?

I have both yay and paru on the two Arch systems I manage, because pacman tends to break those occasionally through dependencies and that way I don’t have to do the whole makepkg bit again and instead can update the one with the other. I still find it asinine that these aren’t in the repos or the functionality isn’t integrated in to pacman, but since Arch’s entire philosophy is based on simplicity, I guess the chosen solution to secure user packages is security by obscurity.

(I only still use Arch on those systems because I haven’t gotten around to migrate them to Gentoo yet, after implementing a binpkg repo and custom profiles many years ago so compiling on the weaker machines is essentially unnecessary, btw.)

Librewolf (with some overrides and a source patch) on the desktop and Fennec on Android. Before Librewolf I used upstream Firefox with the Arkenfox user.js, but Librewolf made that obsolete.

I haven’t looked into Fennec’s current version in detail, mostly because I use the browser so rarely on my phone and my main consideration is not getting ads when I do, but they might still use SafeSearch and stuff like that, so if you’re aware of any better alternatives that are in F-Droid please tell me.

Also, you only need that stuff to begin with if you don’t have control over the operating system and your browser (like on Apple or Microsoft). For me, using a Firefox-based browser with uBlock Origin on both phone and desktop is enough so I don’t have to ever see ads, and I just don’t install spyware in the first place.

I think git is the obvious choice, both in ergonomics and flexibility (custom commands). But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.