By balance I mean I don’t go full LARPer when doing basic stuff like online banking and buying stuff from Amazon. LARPer means Live Action Role Play and refers to someone overly paranoid about every little thing. In other words, their threat model is wrongly applied to basic things. If you’re a journalist you may want to use Qubes and use disposable VMs to open PDF documents, for example. Most people would be fine just opening the PDF in Google Docs. The extreme options I mentioned can be used if you’re a target of harassment, like changing your legal name, or if you’re a prominent activist you may need a burner phone to attend a protest. It’s all about your threat model. Also: disabling Intel Management Engine could be useful for protecting your business secrets and intellectual property, but for most people doing mundane things it’s an extreme step to take.