My advice: Stick to distros and softwares that are widely used. When presented with options, tend to stick to the defaults.

Just because literally 100% is customizable in the Linux world does not mean you have to customize your system 100%.

That’s my motto since 1996 when I started using Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung

I’m OK with GNOME.

I firmly believe there are no backdoors or anything dodgy going on here

OK but that’s hardly reassuring.