you can remove firmware and other software that doesn’t pertain to your system. the regular upgrade process will be shorter and you’ll save some SSD space.

however, you’ll lose the ability to take this SSD and plug it in a completely different system, like e.g. an intel laptop, and have it boot right up, unmodified.

every mobile device I ever owned is encrypted and protected with a reasonably secure pass-phrase so losing it is no big deal. it is conceivable someone could forensic the shit out of my setup but that is highly unlikely; it’s far more likely it’ll get wiped and sold or parted out.

I’ve done no benchmarks but I haven’t experienced any issues ever. the oldest linux device I own is a 2011 MBP (i7-2635qm, so quadcore) and I don’t perceive any speed degradation; it’s possible 1st gen Core i5/i7 could have issues as those don’t have AES-NI in hardware or sumsuch plus they’re SATA2 only, but those would be 15+ years old at this point.

with btrfs that has on-the-fly compression, copy-on-write, and deduping, everything works seamlessly, even when I have database-spanking applications in local development.

so the only thing I’ve changed recently is encrypting every device I have, not just the mobile ones. the standalone devices get unlocked with a key-file from the local filesystem so they boot without the prompt. selling/giving away any of those drives, mechanical or SSD, is now a non-issue.

for future reference, encrypt your drives from the get-go. even if it’s not a mobile device, you can use on-device keys to unlock it without a pass-phrase.

source: used shred on a couple of 3.5" 4 TB drives before selling them, took ages…

that’s for Fedora, for Ubuntu it’s toram I think? or was that for older versions… Esc during boot to verify, if it goes “loading to RAM” then you know it’s working.

to add to what others already said, the work from linux-surface is being adopted in the mainline, so it is possible that your hardware is already supported in a modern distro, like Fedora. boot it off a live USB image and poke around, you’ll get a better feel for it.

pro tip, at the GRUB menu press ‘e’ to edit the first item and then add rd.live.ram and that should load the image to RAM. you can then remove the USB and it’ll be way faster to navigate and it won’t touch your existing SSD install.

all Apple devices are part of a covert peer-to-peer network and its primary purpose is to facilitate the Airtags and find-my-shit apps. it runs on desktops, laptops, phones, ipads, watches, etc., including when they’re supposedly off. you can’t turn it off or opt out of it and what that crap additionally does and how secure it is is unknown.

having said that, if you run linux on an old intel-based macbook or similar (say, up to 2015 models) you’re out of that racket and similarly all Apple or iCloud based crap. they do have a permanently enabled IME but that’s true for the majority of devices sold and, dependent on your threat model, isn’t an issue per se.

not sure about the “credit card” angle as you can’t buy a new Apple device that runs linux, the asahi mess is limited to M1/2 models which are like 5 years old at this point.

I run all three of those (delta on hosted IMAP servers, matrix synapse, prosody for XMPP) for various clients and each has its own issues that need work. with deltachat there is no fallback if the project stops or gets taken over or whatever. with XMPP at least you have options, this client, that client, etc. as well as decades long development. based on that, some free advice (worth what you paid for it) - don’t give up on XMPP just yet. good luck.

it’s a super-shitty experience, both on XMPP and Matrix, and you touched only on one of the aspects. and that’s not even the bad part. the bad part is nothing better is on the horizon.

so what you gotta do is put on your big boy pants, sit down and figure this shit out. here’s where I made I misstep, let’s figure out how to do redundant backups and seamless restore accross devices. etc.

because, this is it. there is nothing better coming, you gotta learn how to make do with the tech we have. offloading your shit to benevolent dictators and hoping everything will be fine is not a strategy,

there’s this thing: STAR WARS GRINDHOUSE