Fedora Workstation is what I use for my desktop. If I were to have to reinstall now I'd do Silverblue.
For my home lab I do Proxmox with a couple of VM's for Ubuntu server for pihole DNS servers and an OpenMediaVault VM for my docker workloads. I'd probably do CoreOS or IoT if I was starting over there though.
Every graphical app I have installed that isn't a basic system application included with the distro install is either in a podman container or flatpak.
You can try Organic Maps if you have a pressing need for privacy in your maps app.
It seems... okay... when I used it. No support for android or apple auto integration though.
Matrix is the usual suggestion. I've never used voice chat on it or the clients for it like Element though so I can't speak to how well it works if you need that function in Discord.
If the Fedora group starts doing dumb stuff I'll consider switching. But so far they've been rock solid. While Red Hat is certainly a major contributor to Fedora (the biggest easily) they don't control it per-say.
Twitter isn't their customer friends.
On the fly atomic updates (the recommended update path for DNF installed apps requires a system reboot.) Though you can do it live, doing offline upgrades is safer so you don't replace some runtime something is using midflight.
Also, flatpaks have some system isolation and have to use flatpak portals and explicit permissions/mounts giving them less ability to negatively affect my system.
Also, Flathub just has everything that I need to run anyway, at least for GUI apps.