linuxmemes

Then install log2ram to avoid constant writes to SD card. Or install DietPi instead of the stock OS, its installed automatically. Honestly DietPi just rocks for SBCs in general, good text UI and utilities.

10 years is a pretty good run for an SD card.. was it an endurance SD? That’s what I’m running. Fried a non-endurance one in under a year, replaced it with an endurance and reduced log writing frequency with some config change and have been cruising for 3-4 years so far.

Its an old meme sir, but it checks out

That only stops browser activity? What about windows, discord, nvidia, ... ? :p
Those are all blocked on my pihole ( i run both pihole and ublock btw )

Or both, both is good.

Works great when you have a device that can use it.

You can setup separate vlans, or even separate networks for allowing the ads if you need.

You can - my wife works with ads as well.

What I ended up doing - I set her laptop with a static IP and added TCP and UDP routes for port 53 (the one used for DNS queries) to 8.8.8.8 - no complaints since ;) I use a cheap Mikrotik router between my ISP one and the actual network (well, a NAS and a Unifi AP, the rest is wireless) so doing it was easy ;)

YouTube ads come from the same server as the content so you can’t isolate them with pihole

No because pi-hole does not block YT ads

uBlock Origin on Firefox still works great if you keep the filters up to date every once in a while c:

Personally I use Stevenblack's default one, in combination with a personal one that i've curated since 2019. Previously I used to use MVPS, however that list's included in the SB default.

Stuff that tends to slip through the cracks with a lot of the common lists includes things like admiral 🤬, user session recorders, and app monitoring platforms like sentryio (useful for development, but I didn't consent my activity being recorded). There's also Bauer Media Group garbage that I've resorted to creating firewall packet inspection rules for, because they're using a subdomain technique that's even worse than Admiral's autogenerated domains - at least with those you can use DNS analysis tools like dnsdumpster to uncover the rest of autogenerated domains in that batch

µBlock Origin is great for browsers that support extensions. But that won't get most Android TV ads or Apple TV users. And I suspect many of the people with pi hole also use µBlock Origin for redundancy.

cant use adblocking on xbox/roku/etc.

pihole blocks ads on those.

Ads are not only present in the browser. For example, there are Smart (not really lol) TVs that have ads embedded right into the operating system (https://reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unremovable_ads_on_my_2500_samsung_smart_tv/). You can't install an adblocker there, but a DNS based filter will know how to deal with this. There are other alternatives, some are cloud hosted like NextDNS or ControlD, there are other local alternatives like AdguardHome or PfBlockerNG if you run a PfSense Firewall. There are also simple solutions like AdGuard's Public DNS or Mullvad's Adblocking DNS servers. If you use an iPhone or iPad, you can easily download a configuration profile that includes the DNS settings for these services. I think NextDNS offers a similar service. On Android, you can just set up Dns over TLS, I think it's called Private DNS in the settings. DNS adfiltering can't get rid of all ads though, e.g. YouTube's mechanism for displaying ads is resistant to DNS filtering. That's what uBlock Origin if for though.

It blocks ads in apps on your cell phone too, not just in browsers

They are kind of two separate things.

Pi-Hole will work on literally every device on your network. It can block ads on smart TVs, cell phones, etc. It can prevent certain forms of tracking on video doorbells, voice assistants, cameras, etc. You can also set up custom DNS to restore online service to old game consoles or to host web services at home.

You also get all the metrics. For example, I can see that my computer reaches out to my printer several times a minute and that the Oculus app for my Quest 2 was reaching out to its servers even when the app was “closed”.

You could also use it as a sort of parental control. It can provide one set of block lists to the parent’s devices and a different one to the kids devices. Or you could do the same with IoT devices so they are only allowed to reach out to the services they need to be able to run.

uBlock is still important though. It’s possible to get around a DNS filter like Pi-Hole by serving ads from the same domain that the core service is served through. uBlock Origin can do things like block YouTube ads for instance.

It's happens sometimes but I must say, not very often. I could probably count on one hand how many times that have happened through my many years of using pihole.