Concretely, my goals are:

• store my coins/tokens on a wallet where the private keys (could) have never touched the internet

• retain quick access to my funds

• maintain compatibility with the web3 ecosystem

• pay the least amount of fees possible for token transfers

Ledger Device Setup

With the goals stated above, I set up my Ledger Nano X. Of course, the battery had depleted and the device was in a deep discharge state. I surmise it's been like that for a long time and hope the battery hasn't gone utterly numb yet. After charging it, I continued with the setup. As security was my main concern, I did not import an existing ETH/BTC/SOL wallet but created one afresh with a 24-word passphrase. After setting up the device, I diligently installed the respective crypto-specific apps on the Ledger and verified the addresses on a block explorer. Then, I transferred coins to the wallets.

This part was very straightforward. The default settings on the Ledger itself are also apt (e.g. 10min PIN code time-out), albeit I set them to be more stringent.

Verdict: smooth experience

Integrating With the Rest of the Ecosystem

The ledger device is used together with the Ledger Live app, which works well enough (up to now) but is not crazy nice/fast/intuitive. Ledger Live works on my main machine (Linux) and on my mobile device (iOS), which is nice.

On the web, MetaMask, Rainbow and Phantom are probably the most used wallets currently. MM allows connecting a hardware wallet. If done, any transaction initiated through MM must be authorised on the hardware wallet first. That sounds nice in theory and I'd love to do that, but alas this feature is not supported by Firefox. This is due to missing webUSB support on Firefox. Mozilla says that webUSB is a liability rather than a feature -- I don't think support is imminent.

Verdict: rough on the edges, no Firefox support

Transferring Tokens

I intend to also transfer the tokens/NFTs I own over. That's put on hold currently because of the high gas fees - if that ever changes.

Appendix: Why did I choose the Ledger Nano X

I did very cursory research on hardware wallets. The two which stood out were Ledger and Trezor. Both have been around for a long time and are fairly trusted (yes, they had security incidents!). The cheaper Trezor model One did not support Monero (XMR) which ruled that model out. Any Trezor also cannot be used with an iPhone currently. Same for the BitBox02. This is why I opted for a Ledger Nano X in the end. For the next HW wallet, I hope to be able to go with a fully OSS version with BT/iOS support.