Encrypted email in the way that Proton and Tuta do it has a lot of drawbacks. Because I almost never use my personal/non-work email to communicate with another human, and automated mails tend to have the message body be no more sensitive than the subject line and metadata, zero-knowledge encryption at rest for just the mail body has a negligible privacy impact for me.

It helps to consider your actual needs and privacy goals, using the services or software that fits them best rather than just following what others say has the best privacy.

I used Proton for two years and, similarly, just recently migrated off of it last month. Since I use custom domains for email through it, and I never cared to use their other services outside of Mail (and occasionally VPN), it was a quick and painless migration. Unlike the painful migration of changing my email address everywhere to be non-gmail (which I still haven’t 100% finished after two years), this time I only needed to update DNS records and copy mailbox data. After migrating, having actual IMAP/JMAP access without a bridge is nice.

Note that you don’t necessarily need to import your entire mailbox when migrating. I never imported my email archive from gmail to proton; an offline archive of all old received emails on my NAS is enough for me if I ever need to search through it. I can even view that archive in Thunderbird.

My thoughts on a few of the other Proton services:

• Proton VPN is really nice. One of the few good ones with port forwarding. But some other options have better pricing than VPN Plus alone outside of the Proton Unlimited bundle.
• SimpleLogin (or Proton Pass masks) is nice, though using anonymous email masks is a trade-off in dependence. I prefer disposable addresses under my custom domain for anything associated with my identity regardless (like services that use my billing or shipping info), and shared domain masks for anything else. My existing shared-domain email masks in Proton still work even after my subscription ended. Addy and Firefox Relay are fine alternatives, and some other mail services like Fastmail have their own equivalent included.
• I’d rather self-host CalDAV/CardDAV than rely on online services for calendar, contacts, etc.
• I had already been using a local KeePassXC database and a NAS for many years so I had no reason to use Proton Drive and Pass, except for the latter’s email masks.

RISC-V is designed to be an extensible instruction set, where the base is very minimal and reduced but a plethora of extensions exist. The ISA can be small for academic and microcontroller uses, large (more than a hundred extensions) for server uses, or anything in between.

Despite the name, a powerful RISC-V server can arguably not be considered “RISC”, though that term doesn’t have a single agreed-upon meaning and some design characteristics strongly associated with RISC still apply such as limiting memory access to dedicated load/store instructions only rather than allowing computation instructions to operate on memory.

Also, not everything is CPU instructions. Acceleration for media codecs, for example, normally means off-loading those tasks to the GPU rather than the CPU. Even if the CPU and GPU are both part of the same SoC, that doesn’t touch the CPU instruction set.

The common issues with RISC-V laptops, or rather any laptops made with SoCs that weren’t designed to be laptop-first, include things like sleep not putting the system in a low enough power state (battery will run out if you leave it folded without turning it off), underwhelming GPU, higher power draw when idle, and lower peak performance for intermittent load. If none of those are a dealbreaker, the newest DeepComputing Framework board (on K3) can arguably be considered a viable daily driver RISC-V laptop option, though I wouldn’t want to use it as one.

Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are the big names for GPUs and they all have products that integrate a GPU into the same SoC as the CPU, but none of them would be likely to license out their GPU IP to other SoC vendors in modern times. Same goes for the in-house GPU designs for Apple/Qualcomm/Samsung. ARM does license out its Mali GPU IP, and that’s often the go-to option for SoC vendors that don’t have their own in-house GPU, but RISC-V systems can’t use that. So RISC-V systems’ GPU options effectively amount to either:

1. Use separate processors for your CPU and GPU. Desktop/server can just slot in a video card. Laptops in the 15-inch or larger space often solder a GeForce or Radeon chip to the board. Smaller 13-inch laptops normally don’t do this because of cooling and battery life concerns.
2. License the integrated GPU from Imagination. That seems to be the only notable GPU offering available to license on non-ARM. Users don’t seem very fond of Imagination GPUs but they’re better than nothing.
3. Pray that one of the companies with an established GPU portfolio decides to not only enter the RISC-V space but also makes a RISC-V processor that can be used in laptops. I think that’s unlikely and they’ll probably focus on server only.

In the first place, consider why you even want to switch to RISC-V. If it’s because of an enthusiasm for open-source and hearing the ISA described as open, know that any performant hardware you’ll get likely won’t be as open as you expect. The SoC won’t be open-source, the CPU cores in it won’t be open-source, the firmware and bootloader might be an open-source u-boot fork but there’s a good chance it’s proprietary. Even the actual implemented ISA won’t be open since major core designers add custom instructions that aren’t part of the RISC-V spec.

Distros like Ubuntu and Fedora seem slated to treat RISC-V as a main architecture that has close to the same number of packages and the same update schedule as x86/ARM by the end of next year, if not sooner. Just like is also the case for ARM, proprietary software like games can run with a nontrivial performance overhead, and other binary software distributed through other channels outside the distro repos (like docker containers, third-party apt/yum repos, or appimage) is often only distributed for x86 even for things that are open-source and can be compiled for other arches without issue.

The software situation can be either a major annoyance or completely seamless depending on how closely you stick to just the distro repos.

Hardware vendors will probably have stuff comparable enough to recent Intel/AMD for desktop in about a year from now. Likely not better, but within the same realm at least. Within another couple years after that you’ll almost definitely see more than one of the established major SoC vendors (like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, or Samsung) release something RISC-V in the desktop, server, or mobile space, which is sure to be competitive with x86 and ARM hardware in that space.

Laptops might not see anything good. An alternate ISA can be viable on servers and mobile (both being Linux-first ecosystems), and desktop can easily inherit from stuff made for server, but laptop has unique hardware needs and the market isn’t there for vendors to bother investing too much R&D on laptop chips that can’t run Windows nor Mac. RISC-V laptops do exist but they’re basically taking chips designed for SBC/edge and throwing them in a laptop shell, with the result naturally being awful at power draw since it was never meant to be a good laptop chip, and the iGPU situation is a mess too. That’s unlikely to change in the next few years.