Create secure and anonymous laptop?

I recently found my old laptop on which I had erased all hard drives. Now I've got the urge to experiment a little with this time. Set up a new OS and software and configure everything a bit.

My thought was to create a system with which you can anonymously be on the Internet. I'm aware that 100% anonymity does not exist and that almost everything can be spied on, especially today.

I don't have any bad ulterior motives or intentions, I'm just interested in the topic.

Because the laptop is no longer in normal operation and has been replaced for a long time, I can do everything with it.

But now to my real question, do you have any suggestions on how I can implement my idea? Or do you know about the topic?

I had dealt with it a bit in the past, but stopped again after a short time. At that time I heard of Tails, Whonix or Qubes, but I never really came to a decision which one would be best for me. I would like to surf the Tor network and set up a VPN connection in front of it. As far as I know, Qubes would be the safest method, but it is difficult to use for beginners (like me).

I need a complex OS with all the bells and whistles. Just one with which I can surf the Internet a bit. And I know that VPN connections are only as secure as the provider!

I thank you in advance!

There's an operating system that does exactly that: Tails. You can install that. This is a Linux distribution, completely free of charge.

If you want to buy something really safe and, above all, anonymous, I would absolutely recommend the OS Tails (a Linux distribution).

https://youtube.com/...GQYo9YB5E8

PS: the installation in the playlist is now very out of date, but just follow the steps on the official Tails page, they are sufficiently well documented.

Tails would be suitable for use with Tor, although I'm not sure how easy it is to set up a VPN connection in front of Tor.

But I would say which OS you are using is not really that important. If security is important to you, in my opinion (especially with laptops) there's no way around using Disk Ecrpytion when you install an OS on the disk (the / boot partition is not that important, you can also leave it unencrypted).

It would also be possible to install a generic Linux distro like Fedora or something and then use Tails in a VM.

In the use case it would be necessary to trust the host OS, but you have an additional security aspect because the browser and Tor are additionally isolated.