I am fairly cheerful in helping family, and a few of my best friends, with computer problems, regardless of what they have. I appreciate the author’s privacy p

I am fairly cheerful in helping family, and a few of my best friends, with computer problems, regardless of what they have. I appreciate the author’s privacy preserving preferences, but I almost always recommend to non-tech family and friends that they consider getting a Chromebook or iPad as their only non-phone device. I don’t think that most people need a general purpose device so why not just make everyone’s lives easier. The Chromebook recommendation may seem crazy from a privacy viewpoint, but if you show people how to configure their Google account to only store YouTube history for 30 days while setting all other data retention to zero days, use Duck Duck Go, turn off location, and use the web version of Proton Mail and Calendar then people have a system that is cheap, useable, and is not so bad from a privacy perspective. I have many different computer systems (4 laptops running Linux, 3 MacBooks, iPad), but use a small Lenovo Duet Chromebook with my recommended setup for much of my casual web browsing, reading eBooks, and using streaming media. I accept any criticism for using Google services, but they do have useful services (I love GCP, and use Hetzner, AWS, and Azure as second choices) and with some care I feel like I can use Google in a reasonably privacy respecting way.