I would reccomend the current configuration that I am running, It is a customised lenovo laptop that I got for little less than $390 (Not us citizen, and we have mid-high taxes, but i got roughly 5% off as student discount and another 5% for credit card payment, and you also apply the CUSTOMOFF coupon for rougly 5% more) - It is lenovo v14 G4 (you can also try to get 16 inch if you prefer that, differnce is roughly $10-20) - 2 things to note - I did not select a ram or storage upgrade - it comes with 8GiB soldered, but there is one slot free, and I added 16GiB which I already had, also I had my 512 GiB SSD, which i swapped with its 256 GiB one. If you would like to, you can get both of these upgraded for about $50 USD. Also you can choose between a 3 cell battery, or a 2 cell and a harddrive (this choice is only available in 16 inch one though).

List of upgrades that I did

Processor AMD Ryzen™ 7 7730U Processor (2.00 GHz up to 4.50 GHz) selected upgrade Display 35.56cms (14) FHD (1920 x 1080), IPS, Anti-Glare, Non-Touch, 45%NTSC, 300 nits, Battery 3 Cell Li-Polymer 45Wh selected upgrade

Here is a link for configurator (not affiliated or anything else)

https://www.lenovo.com/in/en/configurator/cto/index.html?bundleId=82YXCTO1WWIN1

I checked this config not available in US

If you want set it and forget, you can try immutable distros like fedora silverblue, if you use bottles for running games, you can look at bazzite. If you want to tinker, then debian/arch/fedora minimal installs and build what you want

i may be wrong here, but if i remember correctly, in ech, essentially our first communication is done with some central server (which as of now is mostly cloudflare) and then they make some connection with target server, and then a channel is established between us and target. my google-fu brought me this , which is basically this only

https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3C9ceBTx5AQXu8tS0lgzdF/55ea89f5a56843db15296b2b47f7b1c2/image3-17.png (https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/)

I am unfamiliar with QUIC, and quick search basically tells it is kinda like multilane highway for udp.

If I have to compare, (not a network engineer or a person who has studied networking, to me anything beyond the simple protocols seems magic), QUIC seems like a techt which is only used after you have made connection with target, so its implementation is google independent (they seem to be lead developers for this). Whereas in ECH, cloudflare are the primary devs, but also the holder for the public keys (someone else can also be the holder, but i dont know of any other provider currently, maybe my lack of knowledge here)

Essentially just an extension of your point that implementation is lacking

for me, currently the problem is over reliance on Cloudflare, which is yet another big tech company