Oh yes, OPNsense. Those sure are some philosophical and practical differences. Differences as in:
- code theft
- copyright abuse
- attempt to steal pfSense trademark in Europe
- toxic project members who publicly attack anyone who dares to point out issues (including assault on all major pfSense developers).
- hiding serious vulnerabilities
- downplaying serious vulnerabilities
Yes, they do awesome job. Check reddit.com/r/pfsense or check forum.pfsense.org or check their contributions to FreeBSD (both $$$ and code). Don't just link some random stupid thread from trolls.
You're confusing two different things. Windows still does phone home even in private network. In private network it just "locks" down access to your computer to some extent.
The same is also present in OS X under Firewall settings where you can go stealth mode and / or block all incoming connections.
This is coming from Hackintosh scene, but I've had enourmous improvements on real Macs as well, which includes Macbook Pro, Air and Mac Pro (not latest gens).
Easiest way is to make backup of applegraphicspowermanagement.kext or just rename it to applegraphicspowermanagement.kext.bak and then rebuild you cache with app like Kext Utility.
Only drawback I see is that graphics card will now use native power management and not Mac OS one. One thing I've noticed, applegraphicspowermanagement.kext has list of graphics cards, so if your card is not identified it appears that generic power / sleep states are being used thus producing glitches.
A bit more about power / sleep states. You've probably noticed that when you have certain animation first time in OS X, it is choppy, but second and third time it's animated perfectly. That's where applegraphicspowermanagement.kext is messing up the states. You can try it on Launchpad or Mission Control animations.
Here's more info on the issue, it's for nvidias but it applies to every graphics cards although ATI is generally more supported on OS X.
It's that fucking applegraphicspowermanagement.kext !! I'm not even kidding with that kext name. If you delete the kext, repair caches and reboot you'll see 10x better and smoother animations.
More about kext itself; it contains the list of supported graphics cards (poor one) and power states for them. Some states are badly done even with supported graphics cards. I had a lot fun with this kext back in the ole' days after Intel switch.