I hate them both. Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium are the true private and non-profit browsers. Firefox and Brave are full of bloat like Firefox’s ads and tracking and Brave’s Wallet, News, Talk, VPN etc

They are just different layouts for Gnome, but it’s annoying that they call what is essentially a donation to them a Pro edition. A donate button would likely make more as it feels philanphropic.

Make sure to use “disable phase inversion” for Opus if you want good quality in mono. I’m suprised this isn’t set by default.

Thinkpads are what you want to look for. You can get a refurbished one from eBay or Amazon Renewed for $300 and they almost all have upgradable storage and RAM, as well as having the rest of the parts being easier to replace than a consumer laptop.

The T14 series is the one to look at.

Onn/Thompson sticks. They also use the stick form factor but they run Google TV so they shouldn’t be affected.

If you’re using this laptop to do work, then Mint or Zorin can’t be beat. They have user-friendly interfaces, they have stable packages meaning updates are unlikely to break your OS, and you can still install new software through Flatpak and Snap.

Once installed, install Librewolf for web browsing, VLC for video playback, OnlyOffice for MS Office files, and any other software you need from the built-in software store. If you choose Mint then you need to turn on unverified Flatpaks in the software store for everything to appear.

Also, with the original 1 x 4 GB of RAM and mechanical hard drive, this laptop will be slow with a modern OS, so I recommend upgrading it to 8 GB RAM (2 x 4 GB is recommended for dual channel speed) and an SSD beforehand.

Use a VPN with a circumvention protocol like Stunnel. Windscribe has a ‘stealth’ mode using it.