I would also recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. I’m usually a Debian/Debian-based person but I’ve been running Tumbleweed on my desktop for a few years now and it’s been great.

It has a few peculiarities like any distro but it’s been very stable, with few issues even with things like Nvidia drivers. Docs and community seem good too.

The platform owners don’t consider engagement to me be participation in meaningful discourse. Engagement to them just means staying on the platform while seeing ads.

If bots keep people doing that those platforms will keep letting them in.