My vision for personal computers #
Hardware #
Hardware should be selected for its purpose. One should select goals and cater the hardware to achieve them. If it will be used for gaming, pick a target frame rate and resolution, and decide what types of games you’ll be playing. If it’s a laptop, consider if you really need to game on it— leaving out a dedicated graphics card will drastically improve battery life.
Make use of second-hand computers. They’re cheap, and in need of good stewards. Select hardware which supports Linux well, and avoid NVIDIA.
I recently picked up a used Thinkpad T480 for $225 with these criteria in mind. It will likely be better for my use-case than my newer, more expensive computer.
See also: Getting your own good enough laptop for under $500.
Operating system #
Computers should run Fedora Workstation, Fedora Silverblue, or secureblue depending on the needs and experience of the user. These are all stable GNOME-based operating systems which prioritize compatibility and convenience on one end, and security, privacy, and best practices on the other.
The user’s home directory should be encrypted with systemd homed, and should be unlocked with a password via a TPM2 chip inside the device or a password and FIDO2 key.
See also: Lennart Poettering’s Fitting Everything Together.
Installing software #
The system should also use bazaar
to install graphical apps, homebrew
to
install terminal applications, and distrobox
via distroshelf
to install apps which don’t support either of these options. If a
package requires deep system integration, it can be installed at the
system level with dnf
and rpm
on Workstation,
or rpm-ostree
on Silverblue and secureblue.
Apps and packages should be installed at the user level, from verified sources as close to upstream as possible. To obtain packages for coding or markup projects, use virtual environments.
Web browsing #
For web browsing, Chromium or trivalent installed at the system level should be used (Why Chromium?). Used properly, Chromium seems to be as privacy preserving as Firefox for common threat models, and is much more secure. This is the case so long as the user doesn’t sign into a Google account and switches to a more private search engine such as DuckDuckGo or Wikipedia.
The user should avoid the pursuit of badness enumeration on the web—that is, listing all the bad things so they can block them. This is the idea behind ad and content blockers. Instead, use the good internet—the internet that respects you. Sometimes we must use the bad internet, but we shouldn’t live on it.