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.