I know that some manufacturers ship QubesOS, those are intended for people with high threat models afaik.

Wayland have worked flawlessly for me, but I do understand that I have a very simple use case, so ymmv.

I found that, at the cost of a few months of absolute suffering, using Gentoo as my first distro fasttracked my Linux learning.

I find ZFS rollbacks to be easier but setting up ZFS can be a pain (other than in Gentoo and NixOS from my experience), so take your pick

As someone who’ve tried Gentoo on systemd and OpenRC, as well as Void with runit, I don’t see any reason to use OpenRC over systemd. I never noticed any performance difference, and it has far less features. As for runit, if half the boot time for half the features is what you need, then go for it.

This is free and pretty effective advertising for Telegram, really.