Gentoo and Debian. Debian will let you get back to what you really want to be doing whereas gentoo gives you excellent granularity over everything, but can be overwhelming and time consuming.
Really should ask yourself what you’ll be mostly doing and pick a tool (distro) that let’s you accomplish that.
Agreed with your closing thoughts. It’s never been more obvious that we can’t rely on commercial entities.
The fruits of years of organic growth within subs squandered in the name of corporate profits should be the wake-up call the average person needs.
Often when things like this happen (see:dig, twitter) the question gets asked “what can be done?” Well, let me tell you about FOSS…
Pretty porthole view of US geopolitics my dude. Peace isn’t zero sum, someone always has to give up something, and people don’t like to be made to feel like they’ve lost. I’d never want a homogeneous society either, too culturally bleak.