After reading the above answer by linux-aarhus, do you have “Never forward non-FQDN” and “Never forward reverse lookups for private IP ranges” enabled on your pihole? (I think they are by default)
The reason I am asking is because I have, and can not ping hostnames directly without adding .local
I WANT this functionality, do you?
Ie, I always ping my ip:s directly (if I need to ping), I have no problem with not being able to ping hostnames directly.