Yes, my thoughts exactly. You can't quite escape concerns about motherboard and cpu manufacturers baking in little security holes, but it's better than buying some pre-packaged system or laptop. Chuck Linux or a BSD on there and boom you've got back most of your general purpose computational freedom.

Of course, you can't change the crappiness of the broader infrastructure, but "give me wisdom to accept what I cannot change" and all that. Choose your battles.

The hardware is also suspect. I think in the author’s mind we need an entirely new computing architecture.

Firefox on Debian spies on me. (I mean, sure, a bare Linux probably doesn’t.)

Can you elaborate on this please? I run firefox on Linux and wasn't aware of any tracking.

Not who you're responding to but default telemetry, default search engine (google), etc