My problem with the built-in charging limiter is that if you are not extremely consistent in your usage patterns (I am not), it basically never kicks in.
I much prefer a manual solution.
I don't know if they changed this, but I think AlDente follows a polling approach where it periodically checks the charge level and enable/disable the charging accordingly. Such solution is more hacky and it also could cause some sleep-related issues.
The SMC key discovered my marcan is nicer because it enables the same functionality without having to poll anything, as it's built into macOS.
Furthermore, I don't care about all the extra stuff they have put into AlDente, I just want to keep my battery at 80%.
FYI, on Apple Silicon Apple included a firmware-level "hard-switch" to limit the charge to 75/80% only. It was discovered by marcan while working on Asahi and in my experience it's much more convenient than the built-in ML-based solution (and also less hacky and bloated than AlDente).
See this discussion [0] on GitHub for the explanation and this snippet [1] for easy use.
This solution also works while the laptop is sleeping, the only limitation is that it doesn't survive reboots.
I think I'm going to adopt the same strategy as you, since apparently nobody can actually show any meaningful proof of widespread hacks happening..
I must also say that if I feared being a specific hackers' target, I would probably make many different choices in how I use computers/the web, other than upgrading my phone :)
I completely agree. My phone lost official LineageOS support last year but it still works fine and I cannot justify throwing it away to replace with a new expensive device full of features I don't give a damn about.
Probably I'm just stupid but I'm going to keep using it until it breaks.
AdGuard for Safari is probably the best option right now, but I really don't like the fact that it ships as a fat electron app..
Hopefully someone will fix uBOL's small incompatibilities
I use Safari as my primary browser, only for its tab groups implementation. In my opinion they just nailed it, I think it's much better than the Chrome one.
I would really like to switch to Firefox as I prefer it in every other way, but I don't think I will move until they offer a robust native tab group implementation (I've tried Simple Tab Groups but I don't want to rely on a hacky extension for such a core functionality).
There's Colima[0], but in my experience it still isn't as stable as Docker Desktop. It also isn't any faster and I doubt any competing software will be, since the best way to virtualize Linux on macOS right now is to use Apple's Virtualization.framework with VirtioFS which is exactly what DD (and Colima) is doing.
On a personal note, I find the menu bar icon useful to see whether the VM is running and to pause/resume it (a functionality that none of the alternatives have).