I am almost certainly going to live with whatever drawbacks in terms of camera quality, battery life, etc. Come with their Motorola phone when it's time to upgrade. MTE is such a non-negotiable for modern digital security on phones it's crazy Google would be so okay with this regression.
What's especially stuck in my mind lately is how insecure basically all desktop OS' feel. In at the point of buying a second and third GPU for my desktop to run my email and browser in dedicated VMs because everything feels as watertight as a sieve. Qubes seems more and more appealing in a world where every open source software supply chain is under seige, corporate software underprioritizes security, and most sites will stop at almost nothing to surveil you.
I truly lament this new reality where MY computers I PURCHASED feel to use like I'm reaching blind into a paper bag filled with razor blades.
> What's especially stuck in my mind lately is how insecure basically all desktop OS' feel.
I ended up switching away from using my Mac to using an iPad M5 + Magic Keyboard as my sole computing device for the security benefits, and it’s been working pretty well and in retrospect I don’t miss anything from macOS aside from a chromium-based browser. However I’ve said it before that switching back to using a Mac after using iPadOS for so long feels like a serious regression, for all it’s faults the iPad + iPadOS feels like a futuristic technology preview of macOS.
For development work I use GitHub Codespaces (and self-host Coder in the future hopefully). I was moving towards cloud/container-based development already and it works nicely. Plus NPM vulnerabilities are no longer a serious issue. Again the only thing I miss is Chromium, but I’ve altered front-end development planning to target Safari/Firefox since websites shouldn’t be implementing non-standard Chrome-exclusive features anyway imo (I’m saying this as someone who highly prefers chromium lol).
>What's especially stuck in my mind lately is how insecure basically all desktop OS' feel. In at the point of buying a second and third GPU for my desktop to run my email and browser in dedicated VMs because everything feels as watertight as a sieve. Qubes seems more and more appealing in a world where every open source software supply chain is under seige, corporate software underprioritizes security, and most sites will stop at almost nothing to surveil you.
I made the same observations and conclusions as you, but a few years ago. I have been daily driving Qubes OS exclusively since on my Thinkpads. If you haven't started to yet, I implore you to consider the following when buying a system for Qubes: mid-line CPU with plenty of PCs (turn off the ECs), As much RAM as you can afford (seriously, budgetmaxxx on RAM), dedicated secondary GPU with the minimum specs you need is a must for inference (may have to widen the budget a little bit after budgetmaxxing RAM).
Expect to not game on the platform. I have not tried this but if you can't cut the digital crack-cocaine habit then it may be possible to set up a gaming qube which takes the dGPU passed through: get a monitor + second USB keyboard & mouse, plug the monitor into the dGPU's HDMI ports, and pass through the secondary peripherals. Digital crack-cocai... err games... don't like having their frames pushed over X11 forwarding even if the dGPU is passed through, so you will need the monitor; the secondary input devices are so the mouse and keyboard inputs don't leave the gaming qube.