technology

Mint is community ran and rips all the sus stuff out of Ubuntu and regularly rails Ubuntus company for privacy issues. Popos is ran by a company that sells computers with the os on it but they regularly adopt similar measures as mint and havent done anything sketch yet. You can check your network connections for processes using the internet and searching each one and what they do. I used mint for a decade and havent found anything sus. Same with arch, Debian and fedora.

For most new to linux security conscious gamers / nerds I usually suggest Bazzite (fedora edited similar to Windows in that core system files cannot change), Nobara (Fedora with custom config) , Pop OS (ubuntu with a mac style preset) and Mint (Ubuntu base and distro with largest community, decent at everything and problems usually have easy solutions).

Debian is for being a FOSS extremist on old hardware.

For being a weird coder that wants to develop on Linux and tweak things a lot I suggest Arch, Manjaro, or Cachyos (gamer oriented coding).

If you're a privacy extremist you should stop using the internet and if you do need it use it only for mandatory tasks on oses such as Tails or Qubes, to reiterate these OSes are not good for daily driving as an avid PC user, they are an accessory to your normal activities and give you the highest degree of security, put it on an old laptop or something and unplug yourself by getting a dumbphone and hook it into a calyx hotspot and do a voip setup with a virtual number.