I’ve been doing so much research on this, but I desperately need the opinions of the minds of this community as this will be my primary device for everything I do.!
I need to buy a new laptop soon. I’ve used a few of Dell’s products and they’ve always been extremely durable and reliable so they’re currently my number one choice for laptop brand to buy. However, I have no knowledge of Dell’s reputation in protecting user privacy or user security…
I’m planning on buying a laptop from their Latitude line because premium hardware devices ALWAYS seems to come with the least amount of pre-installed bloatware and other malware that disguises itself as “bonus software”.
My old Dell Latitude that’s a decade old still works and it came with some great security functions like when it turns on it asks for a password and other features as well.
By the way, I’m fully aware that many people are struggling financially at the moment with the way the world is and I’m just barely holding up myself, but I honestly believe paying more in the short term when you buy the device works out much cheaper in the long term if it protects your privacy and is made of durable materials.
Huh, I didn’t know about KDE Neon. Its just ubuntu LTS though: KDE neon, that barely counts as a distro (its just the ‘Kubuntu’ flavor of ubuntu with up to date KDE software). Furthermore, since its LTS, it probably wouldnt be a great choice for security reasons
I’ve had a solidly positive experience with Dell. Its one of the few major brands that offers Linux editions for a subset of their hardware. Because of this, hardware compatibility has not been an issue.
In terms of hardware & privacy, I’m not really sure if there are any pros/cons to Dell specifically. As others have mentioned my attention would be mostly focused on the OS and software you choose to run.
I’ve been fulltime Linux for a long time now, so replacing Windows with my preferred Linux distro is always one of the first things I do. Back when I was a Windows user, a clean install of vanilla Windows from MS (in place of the OEM / bloat-y preinstalled versions) was one of the first things I’d do also. I like starting from a clean and known state rather than wondering what the OEM has changed.
For privacy your laptop hardware choice barely matters. What matters is your choice of OS, OS configuration and additional software you use.
Dell is a good choice due to often providing longer firmware updates than most other laptop manufacturers. If you want additional security, you can buy a Secured-Core laptop, which has additional security built-in.
But tbh, Dell’s Secured-Core devices would be too expensive for me, even considering the security benefits, especially since you could get a MacBook in this price range, which would be a better choice overall. If you can wait for black friday, you might be able to get a cheap Secured-Core device from some manufacturer. For example Lenovo usually has great deals. If you are short on money, I wouldn’t stress it just for secured-core.
If you’re going to do that make sure you check the feature support matrix. There are quite a few things that do not work correctly, eg Thunderbolt, video decoding/encoding etc.
My vote goes to Framework with Fedora or Mint installed. It’s safe, secure, tested, and will last for years on end unless there is any physical damage to the device.
We haven’t seen how long the Apple Silicon Macs are going to be supported for. I would expect it to be longer since they don’t rely on intel for firmware updates anymore but who knows.
You can install asahi Linux after the support ends and keep using it forever if you want to.
