I’m not suavevillain, but I recently switched to PopOS after a love hate relationship with Windows. I would leave Windows, then come crawling back for one reason or another, this stint is the longest I’ve had staying away from it.

I personally like PopOS. But for a less bloated environment and easy to spin up system, you could look at Linux Mint (https://linuxmint.com/).

This is why I use Brave on iOS devices. It is the best option I found. Others mention Adguard home and pihole. They just don’t work as well at blocking ads.

The spyware link is not a credible resource. Read some of the other comments here and look at what that site says about Firefox.