Ask HN: Reasonable Linux distro that balances security, privacy and usability?
Your goals aren&#x27;t very clear. Your threat model matters a lot to answering the question. What is your threat model?<p>Your browser alone is probably 10 fold the threat to your privacy the operating system is, and a share of the telemetry is legitimate and very much directly useful for improving the product and responding to incidents.<p>Any linux distro probably won&#x27;t hash&#x2F;index all your files into a voice assistant, won&#x27;t virus scan, and won&#x27;t backup to a cloud, which is an immediate privacy and security win.<p>If you want to engage in the privacy mindset, you must first focus on observability. Specifically you should be thinking about how to set up a proxy&#x2F;firewall between your daily driver and the raw internet to see what is accessed.<p>Without observability, you don&#x27;t know what is doing what no matter what you use. You are forced to trust without understanding, and you wouldn&#x27;t be able to answer your own question empirically. Without an off machine firewall, you can&#x27;t prevent the behavior you want to prevent.<p>For a long time OpenBSD had the reputation for being most secure by default. I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s still true. Running some type of observability&#x2F;firewall platform on that would probably be useful. I&#x27;ve never used mitmproxy, but I imagine that would be useful.