The family sharing works okay but the old school way is good too.

Qubes and opensuse are great for any VM needs. Not sure what the issue with privacy is exactly you can pretty much reconfigure any distro to be oriented the way you want it.

This isn’t the recommended area for this kind of discussion so check out fmhy https://fmhy.pages.dev/

Novacustom looks pretty good. Wish it had amd GPU options but other than that the prices are right for the hardware.