Ok, in your Post you say you want Privacy, but go on to describe Distros for Security.

Before you do anything, you should make a threat-model:

• Who do you want your data to be safe from
• What applications/programs do you use
• Who do you want to be protected against security wise.
• Are there any institutions/irganizations you trust (Tor, i2p, BitWarden, Linuxkernel, *BSD, Firefox, Chromium, Xmpp, Matrix, LLVM)

If you can answer the questions above, you can make more informed decisions, and if you want you can tell them to me either publicly or over multi@conversations.im (xmpp)

Here a short summary of a few operating systems to choose from:

Fedora Silverblue: Pros:

• Encryption of personal data possible
• Immutable
• Mandatory Access Control framework (SELinux)
• Everything is set up for you already, by people that know their stuff
• Big company with lots of resources, and fast security updates Cons:
• Big company you have to trust
• Less control over the operating system. Both for you or an attacker
• Immutability still very new, may cause problems

Alpine: Pros:

• very minimal -> small attack surface
• encryption optional, and made easy Cons:
• no MAC my default
• a lot of configuring you have to do yourself. Mistakes are a big concern

OpenBSD: Pros:

• audited into oblivion
• incredibly minimal Cons:
• incredibly minimal: No mac framework (!!)
• Disk encryotion might be tricky on your first try
• software support
• Wayland support still experimental

In my conclusion: If you trust Redhat more to build a safe os than yourself: go Silverblue

If you know what you are doing Alpine is a more minimal approach than Arch, and may be a fantastic choice if you know how to set up mac, fdi and a secure desktop

If you have a server or reverse proxy, OpenBSD will be a incredibly tough nut to crack for even government agencies, but due to the missing mac usecases as desktop simply don’t make sense to me.

I hope that helped