@Terry @histoire
It's complicated, the kernel is bloated and unhardened and there are some distros like Ubuntu with telemetry. It is definitely possible to remove anything even remotely sketchy from linux (there are hardened kernals built with this in mind), but it's probably easier to move to a schizo operating system like openBSD. And if you're gonna do that you also need to worry about things like backdoors in your hadware. All of this is ignoring the linux distros built with maximum privacy in mind, going as far as having all network activity routed through TOR and only being usable through a live environment. Basically, it's really complicated as "linux" isn't monolithic. Any linux though is pretty good for privacy/security and basically the best you can do without going pretty far out of a non-hacker's comfort zone, as the first step to a truly secure desktop is librebooting a cpu, which only works on certain (usually old) cpus and risks permanently bricking them if done wrong.