Better UI consistency. It's always really annoying when you have your nice dark theme and a bright white page pops out of nowhere and fry your eyes.
For ease on the eye, keep everything black on white, and turn down screen brightness if the environment is dark.
I beg to slightly differ, but it's a good take overall:
Aeon Desktops it is
Aeon FTW
Aeon is the way
Always love to see article of non programmer people using Linux or Emacs!
pfetch anyone ?
As pointed out by @themoonisacheese, immutable distros are getting some traction recently and they are good for making a system reproductible, allowing easy rollbacks, but this should not make a big difference, privacy-wise. It also add some work for configuration / learning. Here are two levels I'm thinking of from what you presented:
You go with any stable (big fan of Debian here too) so to avoid data breaches from brand new packages (xz...), then you can compartimentize your application with Flathub and manage the rights with Flatseal. If you go with software with less telemetry (Firefox), this should be a reasonable and easy to use setup. The rest of the privacy will depend on what is going on inside of your web browser, probably.
The next step would be something like Qudes-OS + Tor. If your workflow / usecase allows it, this should be a good step up for privacy. Your laptop seems beefy enough to handle the many VMs, and the install is easy enough imo.
Now we're talking!
Alpine works great for the desktop and I'm using it myself for my lower end machine.
Working without glibc and with some strangly named packages is sometimes tricky, but so far I have been able to do anything I'd wanted!
If it can help you in your journey, here is my personal configuration for Alpine, with WMs and DEs on their own branches. Only the 'suckless' (DWM) and 'xfce' are working properly so far: https://gitlab.com/sunoc/als/-/tree/suckless?ref_type=heads