Hello, want to see what people look for in security or privacy terms while choosing next pc or laptop. Maybe some tips or things that changed usage of that device with bigg impact.
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Hi, giving an advice is not easy if we do not know what you’re looking for. A PC can be bought for a lot of different use cases as gaming, office, selfhosting server usage, OS requirements and so on. I mean, I can tell what my choices are, but they could be completely different to your needs.
As I understand you, you are not looking for specific PC hardware, but it would be good to know an use case, so that we can tell “If I would need a PC for this case, I would look for feature XYZ”.
Privacy Guides has a Choosing Your Hardware guide that lists some important security considerations. As for privacy, I’d pick something with good Linux and Wayland compatibility. Even if you planned on using Windows, it’s important to buy something that will at least run Linux well in case you ever decide to switch or use something like Tails. I made the mistake of not accounting for that when buying a Windows laptop in the past and eventually regretted it.
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I’m choose laptops with Linux preinstalled. Tuxedo Computers is my first address for that.
For price sensitive people, I’ve selected used devices too. A Lenovo Thinkpad or Think Center or devices from Fujitsu made good cheep office computers on several occasions.
For security the thread model I target usually looks as follows:
Physical Access to the device is restricted and it’s very unlikely, that someone will try to break into the device. So full disk encryption and secure boot are not very important. (That said, you can get devices form Tuxedo Computers with pre-enabled full disk encryption.) An encrypted home folder is enough in most cases.
The main threat comes from online sources and communication. To combat those threads:
- Automatic regular software updates
- A good password manager protected with 2FA hardware key
- Long, unique, randomly generated passwords for all network accessible logins and 2FA via TOTP where possible
- Self hosted storage solution (NAS or Nextcloud) with automated backups
- End-to-end encrypted E-Mail-Provider (Tuta or Proton for example)
- End-to-end encrypted messengers (Signal and Matrix)
For privacy it’s Linux and Open Source Software where ever possible. - Sometimes it’s not. If a proprietary software is required and it’s not available on Linux, I’d go either for a Mac or Windows in a virtual machine on Linux. In case of the latter, I’d just install absolutely minimum necessary applications on Windows and would mostly work with Open Source Software on Linux.
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