Ask HN: Reasonable Linux distro that balances security, privacy and usability?

One of the most common answers when asked about "How can I achieve more privacy and security with my OS?" is to switch to FOSS/Linux.

The biggest issues I have is that, when you search for privacy oriented Linux distros - they almost always boil down to the following: Qubes, Kodachi, Kali, Whonix, Tails, BlackArch, and variants.

My issue is that these are not very user-friendly or user-oriented distros. They are more or less distros for either security experts, the very paranoid, or penetration testers.

My thoughts on a private OS isn't necessarily one that's safe from a direct attack or something you need to secure spy-level intelligence, but one that does not leak private information, does good-enough encryption by default and offers great usability while allowing access to a good set of applications that are also privacy-oriented. Applications and the OS should not leak telemetry data by default (opt-in only) or have no private data leaked at all.

Obviously, a certain amount of data will inevitably be shared (DNS lookups, Google searches) but that kind of information should be communicated to the end-user as much as possible.

I'd love to see more discussion around this, because I think that this is a topic that will become ever so critical with the increase in "telemetry data" being collected.