Without being specific, I’d try to get something with firmware updates available on LVFS: https://fwupd.org/
And you might want to check for distribution specific notes on that model e.g.
- https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Category:Laptops
- https://linux-on-laptops.com/
- https://www.linlap.com/doku.php
If Wayland is more important to you than AI/ML/LLMs then you probably don’t want anything with an nVidia GPU
Hmmm, is CloudFlare known for being a bad actor in terms of privacy?
Setting that aside, no matter what you pick, you’ll be exposing your IP address, from which your ISP and/or general location may be derived
If you don’t trust CloudFlare with that information then you basically cannot trust anyone else, so maybe you’d need to run your own service and ping that instead now that you’re in a situation where you can only trust yourself 🤷
The other issue that comes to mind is that you’re only testing reachability to one address, which means you could get a false negative where that address stops working but the rest of the internet is actually fine