This article, while it does mention Qubes, fails to mention one of the most obvious and important things users can do: stop using proprietary operating systems, especially Windows 10. Apple at least places emphasis on user security, but they can still betray you at any moment without your knowledge.

If you're not interested in switching away from your proprietary operating system, don't do anything sensitive on it.

The article also mentions installing updates promptly: on a proprietary operating system, you're in a pretty bad situation; you need the security updates immediately, but those updates could introduce e.g. backdoors. This is possible for free/libre OS's like GNU/Linux as well---update mechanisms are considered by a number of security experts to be a sort of universal backdoor---but the software at least has a chance to be inspected by the community and the package maintainers. Some distros /package mangers put emphasis on security and reproducible builds, like Debian and Guix. And remember that, while it's impossible to have security without free software, the reverse isn't necessarily true. If you can use software with reproducible builds, then you can also be sure that the binary wasn't compromised.

!privacy