Recommended Stuff

Hardware

I think computers should be silent, moddable and cheap. CISC is (not yet) dead, long live RISC. RISC, especially ARM, has basically a monopoly on power-efficiency, which leads to less fan noise. However, the Snapdragon X or the M* chips by Apple are very expensive. The most popular cheap ARM computers are the Raspberry Pi boards, which are laughably slow compared to used computers, around the same price. Therefor I would say, get a used small office PC and invest the rest in silent coolers.

Software

This will apply to systems running the Linux kernel, most things should work with FreeBSD, maybe with OpenBSD and sadly NetBSD’s wayland support isn’t fully there yet.

• Shell: ZSH
• Terminal: Alacritty
• Compositor: Sway | River(still in beta)
• Editor: Vim
• Taskbar: Waybar
• Init: Dinit
• C lib: Glibc (MUSL is better on paper, however most software is written with glibc in mind, even in the FOSS world)
• Compiler: GCC
• Package manager: KISS | pkgsrc (both are super portable and simple, in a good way)
• Coreutils: BusyBox
• Browser: LibreWolf | qutebrowser (qutebrowser is nice, however the adblocking is bad)
• Bootloader: Limine
• Boot software: Libreboot

Phones

Get the cheapest one you can and put NewPipe on it. All phones over 200€ are a scam. I always get the lower end Galaxy A* phones, they work. Phones aren’t desgined to be privacy respecting. Watch the Luke Smith video for more info.