Occasionally it’s caused some problems with the tracking crapware that the spouse’s company uses in their web platform. Since they work from home and it breaks the main site they use for work, I’ve had to add some exceptions.

I’ve also seen it occasionally cause problems on websites that rely on tracking garbage and outright fail when they’re blocked. Usually I just never go there again but in a few cases it’s been something I was forced to use so I just disable the pihole for five minutes, do what I need, and hope to never visit that site again.

I think there have been maybe eight of these occurrences in the past five years so it’s not a continual annoyance. No big deal and definitely worth it.

My gf likes to click on ad entries of Google searches - that doesn’t work

I use default block list and had 0 issues so far

Most things just work, and I have 3.5 million domains blocked. When something doesn’t work you can go into the query log to see what was blocked, and whitelist it from there. I seldom have to do this. Some apps are written to fail completely if they can’t send their telemetry, but most just work without the ads.

Important? Depends on who you ask, but annoying? Yes absolutely. I’ve found with both Pihole and Adguard Home that deal links posted on Slickdeals are broken. But those also redirect several times and it can be a bit cumbersome to whitelist all the domains.

I also found out recently that one (or more) of my blocklistsnin AGH was blocking Steam from uploading games saves. So I had to remove some.

Depends on what lists you add to pihole (or adguard).

The default lists for both are primarily advert or tracking related, and very safe to keep. The only time I whitelist is when I’m following some kind of shopping deal that uses a tracker. Most linux related things are free from that.

Quite often, yes, especially for apps.

For nearly a year the Android Amazon app wouldn’t work. It would load, and then when a tracker failed to start, would show a generic error message page.

US bank mobile app wouldn’t login for about 2 months last year.

This happens quite often when apps are built with dependencies they assume will load, and when there is a failure an error boundary catches it and shows an error view.

There might be a chance for false-positives. Or to just clog your dns responses with repetitive queries.

Then again, you don’t need more than a HaGeZi blocklist anyway.

About two years ago I played a shitty mobile game called Idle Miner Tycoon and its pseudo-multiplayer system wouldn’t work. It turns out that Pi-hole was blocking a domain the game used. While I did whitelist the domains I ended up not playing the game anymore.

I have a pihole, I love it. My wife hates it so much I made her her own Wi-Fi network on her own vlan that’s isolated from the rest of the network and uses Google dns. My wife likes to click ads and watch TikTok and all that shit is blocked on my network

Been running it 7 years with a combined adlist of 1,089,320 domains.

It’s really rare that I run into a site that won’t load or function correctly (like once maybe twice a year). The most noticeable really is the ad results in Google, but I’ve moved away from that to DuckDuckGo anyway.

In the few cases that you do want to use a blocked doman; you can open pihole and either whitelist the domain with one click right out the query log, or disable pihole blocking entirely for 5sec-30min with one or two clicks.

If you really want to, you can group clients and adlists so some clients have much stricter blocking than others do. You can even leave some devices completely free of blocking while still using pihole to log their traffic.

By far one of the noisiest blocked domains is Nvidias driver telemetry. If you don’t strip it out using NVSlimmer, it’ll constantly retry its phone home, spamming the pihole with dns requests (not enough that it can’t handle, but enough that it’s VERY noticeable in the dashboard)

I’m using AdGuard, which is pretty similar. I had issues with my Sonos speakers. The devices couldn’t find the speakers until I set a few servers on the whitelist.

Apart from that, all’s good.

Yesterday I couldn’t download stuff from Ansible gateway because my lists blocked the object storage URL but there’s a query log in both tools that makes troubleshooting easy and Adguard has a disable protection button that can disable filtering and can disable it for a set amount of time so you don’t forget to turn it back on

You have full control over what you block and whitelist. So if anything goes wrong, you can just troubleshoot it and whitelist if needed. If all fails, you can always (temporarily) turn off all blocking in pihole.

DNS blocking is heavily dependent on the blocklist(s) you use. It’s entirely possible to block >95% of crapware, and break companies’ ability to track you without compromising usability.

Having used both for a lot of years, I’d say look instead at AdGuard Home. It is also FOSS but supports more out of the box; including certificate management, the ability to use encrypted DNS both upstream and downstream without need for third party software (cloudflared), the ability to use adblock filter syntax (lists are 200k lines instead of 2 million lines, but actually block more), and so on. PiHole has some improvements pending in the next version, but it’s not there yet in comparison, imho.

I’d also strongly suggest you check out Hagezi’s DNS blocklists, as they’re pretty much set and forget. They’re intended to be used as your only block list, and do an excellent job (see testing in the Discussions on their GitHub). Use the Normal list if you don’t want to deal with false positives occasionally, and the Pro++ list if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty (whitelisting occasionally) and want to block every last scrap of annoyance and anti-privacy crapware on the web. Both will significantly improve your online experience.