If you're experienced enough to be comfortable with *nixes, try OpenBSD (it's actually simpler and easier than Linux IMO, but smaller+more elitist community and

If you're experienced enough to be comfortable with *nixes, try OpenBSD (it's actually simpler and easier than Linux IMO, but smaller+more elitist community and less hardware support). If not, I'd say your choice of Fedora is probably a decent one - it has a graphical installer, large community, and RedHat backing. Ubuntu is decent, but they've had their own metadata-harvesting scandals, so I would avoid it since you care about privacy. Linux Mint might be a good alternative if you want to take advantage of being downstream from Debian (not worth as much nowadays as it used to be, but still very big). For search engines, there are a few different strategies: you can use small independent search engines and hope they don't go evil, use a search engine based in a political adversary of your home country (they probably won't give data to your government), run a meta-search engine like searx or a p2p engine like yacy, use a VPN+separate browser for all non-official internet browsing (to avoid fingerprinting), or some combination of the above.