@cwebber Ah, well, to actually answer your question:

- I generally prefer to mitigate issues, even if that means inconvenience or lack of performance. I put a great deal of time into making life intentionally difficult for myself, for many different things, in the name of security.

- In certain circumstances, I may choose not to adopt that practice depending on my threat model and the tradeoffs.

- For people who aren't able to understand the risks and tradeoffs thoroughly, I'd recommend that they go with less performant systems in favor of mitigations.

- BUT, in the context of Intel, their microcode updates are non-free, and so I won't install them, and I won't recommend that people install them. But I will warn them of the risks.

TBH this is the main thing making me wary of purchasing a Purism laptop---I really would like to eventually, but I'm having a lot of trouble justifying using an Intel processor (or most modern hardware, for that matter, that isn't libre) for any computing that I may consider sensitive. And a personal laptop inevitably falls under that category.

It's a shitty situation. But yes, I would consider purchasing a computer that's 3x slower for personal computing. If I'm doing something CPU or memory intensive like compilation, I usually offload to a separate box anyway, since that isn't usually sensitive.