> Almost every third-party firewall for Windows has been able to do this since at least the early 2000s. ZoneAlarm had this functionality in 2001, two years before the initial release of Little Snitch.
ZoneAlarm is a whole antivirus afaik, not just a firewall. If there's something out there that can replicate WFC[0]'s functionality while suspending connections instead of blocking them, I'm all ears, since that's my biggest gripe with how Windows Firewall works (since WFC is only a front-end to it).
> This has been possible via third-party software since the mid-2000s (Virtual Audio Cable, VB-Cable, etc.).
By installing drivers and rebooting your computer and you get a fixed number of them.
On macOS with Loopback and Audio Hijack, you can create any number of virtual audio devices and route audio between them however you want with switches and filters and etc. in real-time.
> The other things have equivalents in Windows, too, like Adobe Illustrator for designs, and trackpad vendor-specific software (e.g. Synaptic, Asus) to use it for handwriting.
Adobe Illustrator is not the same type of software (this is why Adobe created Adobe XD). It's not usable for the reasons I used Sketch.
As for handwriting, Inklet was more advanced than that, it allowed you to scale and move the working area around the screen with gestures, and actually write into other applications instead of a dedicated signature window (which is what this "vendor-specific software" were designed for).
My point isn't that you can find some solution to create a similar result, my point is that the actual pieces of software that are available are quite unique and don't really exist anywhere else.
There's just something attractive about macOS being a true Unix with a huge userbase of people who will pay for good apps.
[0]: https://www.binisoft.org/wfc