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Review: TBlock
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Earlier I pointed out TBlock's approach, using our hosts file to block domain name resolution, is an approach which will work for most content, most of the time. It's not perfect, but it works well enough that it can block a lot of the content we do not want to see and stop a lot of trackers. It is not bullet-proof, but it is good enough for a lot of situations.
My main concern with TBlock is not its features or performance, but the ecosystem's apparent lack of maintenance. Both the application and the lists of domains to be blocked appears to be discontinued. They still work - most of the time, in many cases - but the cracks are showing in the paint. The repository lists could do with a clean-up; useful lists should probably be moved to a repository managed by TBlock; and it would be nice to see broader support across the Linux and BSD communities.
Maybe there will be more updates from TBlock in the future, but at the moment the application looks somewhat abandoned. Even some of the documentation pages returned 404 errors when I was browsing the manual. This sort of thing isn't necessarily a deal breaker for this type of application, but it does make me hold off recommending this application for new installs. If you already use it, then the software will likely continue to work and run well for years to come, but I'm not sure I'd deploy it on a new system without knowing when repository updates might resume working.