Anything can be used as an excuse by those people if they want, same way that cops can pull you over because “you swerved” and can search your car because “it smells of weed.”
It’s totally a reasonable precaution to have an inexpensive phone that is used for international travel and has no significant personal info on it in the event of theft, loss, or other threats.
I agree it could be a coincidence. It’s just a really unfortunate coincidence in light of his public statements and the fact that so many other corporations are doing an any% evil speed run right now. Folks are right to ask questions and be wary.
The hate for proton is because the CEO Andy Yen retweeted Trump announcing his pick for assistant attorney general for antitrust cases. His retweet included commentary fawning over Republicans as “standing for the little guys.” When criticized the company doubled down and supported him but then said they wouldn’t be making any more comments because it was a distraction.
If that isn’t enough, someone noticed that CEO Andy’s Reddit username is ”andy1011000.” The numbers at the end are binary for “88” - a well known pro-Nazi dog whistle. He says this is only a coincidence and is meant to refer to being born in 1988.
So in summary he is publicly praising fascists and has a username which coincidentally has a pro-Nazi reference.
I’m using an RTX 5800 with Nobara and although I can game fine I get multiple graphical bugs in the desktop (parts of windows not fully rendering, flashing artifacts when moving windows, and aliasing artifacts around fonts (yes I’m running the correct resolution). So Ulrich is right, it’s absolutely a problem even on newer hardware too.