Going email free would mean going internet free. Without email you cannot have online accounts. Right now practicing simple living includes doing my job for which I need internet and email.
Even in the future when I eventually retire I would still use internet for communication and playing games with the people I love and cannot see often.
So my version of simple life includes internet and email.
Are you sure your standards of beauty apply to most people? IMO macos design looks cheap compared to kde.
The main reason open source projects lack adoption is because there is no marketing or lobbying budgets.
Also you seem to be new here. No one cares about karma on Lemmy.
Imo you picked the ugliest distro. You can pick any distro with kde desktop environment. It looks good by default. https://kde.org Or I like the looks of Deepin.
You can use firefox. Or degoogled andoid rom. Google spies on your phone mostly through their apps: chrome, maps…
Andoid by itself is very privacy focused operating system.
Check c/degoogle on how to remove google stuff from your phone. Also check privacy guides about vpns: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
They are mostly not what they are advertised as. You should check tor. And maybe /e/os