I’m not sure about how private it is, but I use Ecosia for my search engine. It works great for me, and the images are alright. They are pretty transparent with their privacy, and you help plant trees too!

Some great newer tech distros would be Fedora Silverblue, or if you like Debian, there is VanillaOS. They are immutable distros, and they introduce a new way of using Linux. I like to pair it with distrobox, which lets you use regular Linux applications in a container.