Frankly, my point was that people hear “Firewall” and they are like
instead of questioning why they react like that.. The truth is, that there is a myth going on, that “Firewalls” are there to protect your PC “from ghosts and evil hackers!!!”
Ignoring the fact that your router already has a Firewall and you don’t need to activate one on your home computer… And even if you had no Firewall, this does not auto-hack you or anything. You are still pretty safe and you are definitely safe enough as a generic home user, as actual hackers wouldn’t waste their time on some random dude on the internet, instead of attacking a corporation worth billions of $$$.
The only thing that comes to my mind, why Firewalls could have a positive effect even for home use is when there are bots that try to auto-hack you. But even then you would need to expose a running service, etc. If you don’t do anything special on your computer, there is little room for someone doing anything to it.
(All this is speaking pragmatically – there is theoretically always a chance someone could just plant a Trojan into your CPU just like that… But the probability of that actually happening is pretty much 0, because, as I said, you’re not worth a billion $… [or are you?
] and even if someone really hates you and would be able to plant a Trojan into your CPU, I guarantee you that they won’t be stopped because of an unconfigured Firewall you just happen to run on your computer. Such expert could hack you, even if you would live in a bomb shelter.)