This only applies to extremely invasive spyware disguised as games which is still a minority.

Deflating? Isn’t that usually very alarming?

I remember my uncle using Firefox, so I thought people heard about Firefox if they at least send emails. As for Linux. I thought like 40% of people at least heard of it without knowing what it is.

Proprietary software is fine (if sandboxed)

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I would count both of those more to authoritarianism

I switched from Mint to CachyOS also as a developer. As I do a lot of piracy I depend on Bottles and flatpak to play pirated games a bit more securely. When flatpak had an issue a few months back with signing their programs bottles didn’t work properly as I had different versions of Nvidia drivers. Up to date native and almost up to date flatpak. I am not sure how others distros handled this, but be prepared that updates might break something. Study a bit about AUR if you decide to go there and try out Cachy for a bit before fully switching on a spare disk or something. I wanted to run a local LLM and virtualbox but I had problems with that likely due to my kernel??? So I am not sure how well it works with docker. All in all, try it out and expect a slight increase in difficulty.