How about Session or SimpleX?

Both are E2EE. Unlike Signal, they also have the benefit of not requiring a phone number, so your account isn’t linked to you that way. In my experience, Session feels more mature, having apps on more platforms and more reliable notifications. However SimpleX has some really nice features, like the ability to have multiple profiles (including hidden profiles).

Does libre fox have Brave-like profiles? It almost looks like just a tweaked version of Firefox.

Firefox has been my web browser of choice for roughly 5 years continuously, on both Windows and Linux. I would say I’m very used to it, and containers. I would agree they are better in some ways, but there is one single, major flaw with them that was enough to make me switch. The way containers handle multiple copies of the same website.

I’m just going to use Pinterest as a random example website. This problem occurs with any website that requires login however. Let’s say you have a single Pinterest account. You make a Firefox container for Pinterest, tell it to always open Pinterest in that container and you are done. Every time you click a Pinterest link, Firefox seamlessly opens it in the correct container. This works great, and is actually a place containers at better than profiles.

The problem starts when you have multiple accounts. Maybe sometimes you want to visit Pinterest while logged out, and other times you want to visit your account for viewing landscape images, and others your account for character references. Now you need at minimum three separate containers, and every time you want to open Pinterest you have to manually launch the container you want it in, which takes a lot of clicks. Now you can no longer just type in the url and hit go.

This is where profiles work so much better for me. I can have a work profile, a personal profile, etc and decide which accounts to login to on each profile. Then when I am in a given profile, I can use it just like a normal web browser without the container system getting in my way.

I tried using those (albeit fairly briefly) and I could not find a way to make profile switching as fluid as I needed.

As a long time Firefox user, I didn’t really understand how much I would enjoy using profiles until I had them. It’s my understanding Firefox can’t replicate Brave’s ease of use. Features such as:

• Clicking the main browser icon/shortcut and being prompted to pick a profile.
• Having a button in the browser to switch profiles on the fly.
• Being able to right click any link and immediately open it in a different profile.

All of these features, and the overall robustness of profiles is great from both a workflow and privacy standpoint in my opinion.

I would be very curious what other browsers people recommend. I use Brave solely because of the profile feature it offers, which for my use case is an order of magnitude better than Firefox’s containers. Is there something more private/better than Brave that still has profiles?

I recently read this article about AirTags, and this post made me think of it.

One of my main takeaways was that the anti-stalker features of AirTags are a bit of a liability for this use case. Imagine you successfully hide your AirTag inside the Deck, and a few days later it starts beeping. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t stay hidden for long! Admittedly, you could potentially remove the speaker when installing it to prevent this.

The other thing I saw, which was a bit more worrying, was that the police were not really inclined to help, and took some prodding. They also got lucky that the stolen item was in a store they could just walk into. If someone steals a Deck and then takes it into their house, who knows if the police would even bother trying to get it back.

I feel like if the goal is to avoid the risk of theft, I would probably look into more physical security. Just keeping it on my person at all times when in high risk areas, potentially in a locking case?

I don’t know, I’m definitely a fan of my deck, but it seems to me like the clunkiness of that setup would be a hindrance. With one of those LapDocks you would essentially have to find the space for both the deck and the laptop, and live with the wires connecting them, as opposed to just having an actual laptop. Then there’s the fact that the deck is running a tweaked version of Linux with all the issues that come with that.

For sort term use I could absolutely see plugging the deck into a regular old monitor and just getting by with that. For long term spending the same money you’d spend on the LapDock on an actual laptop (new or used) and installing a full fledged Linux distribution would result in something way more functional. Then when you want to game you pull out the deck, and you have a normal laptop you can use for other purposes, with actual portability if you need it.

If you need Windows for your use case, the actual laptop option is probably even more compelling, as it would likely just work right out of the box, with zero configuration required.