Old Vivaldi user here. Vivaldi is quite lacking in privacy, and chromium made it worse to use over the years. I would not recomend it.
You would be better off with Librewolf, if you want a more fancy fork you can try Floorp (silly name I know), it's quite similar to Vivaldi regarding customisation and options.
Or you could try Zen..but as far as I am aware it's still in alpha, lack some options, especially regarding privacy so may be not the best (you can still edit the about:config though). I keep trying it again and again, only to be disapointed because it's still too fresh.
Being halfway between both sides
People really need to stop playing devil advocate, «Especially in light of the enshittification of everything lately». Mozilla has gone downhill for a good while now, being gentled by sweet Google money and spending it in trends far too late only to waste it, employees keep getting fired while the CEO gets a regular raise and Firefox barely got improved over the years. And now they want to jump head first into AI, way too late again, all the while we already know all AI compagnies run at a tremendous loss. Can you even call that « trying to sustain itself» at this point ? Seems surreal to me.
All I really see is another breach of trust in a full history of mistakes, probably the last one.
«an overused meme about Arch» was a very nice edit I must say xD
I get the annoyance around tribalism/elitism, some people in other posts pointed out the fact that silly dramas and bad/dumb linux takes scares out new users but tbh I feel more confortable with a vocal community, even a silly one. Feels healthier and more alive to me than a mute and apathetic one.
If something goes wrong, if something displeases someone we will hear about it, people will get angry, at the worst we get a nice entertainment to watch and a good laugh, at the very best it leads us to some nice changes.
It's something I grew to like about Linux, even the silliness of it all, even how you can't really tell if people are dead serious or not about the stupidest things.
On EndavourOS here, I spent hours upon install tinkering and setting everything like I wanted and forgot most of what I did ever since.
I'm so lazy I use a one word alias to update all my stuff in one go. I rarely have to bother myself reading and checking if everything's fine (I still do it from time to time just to be safe but I do it less and less because it's almost useless).. I even update a bit late sometimes and quite randomly in general.
It's been almost 4 years like this now, nothing ever broke, had an issue with an Aur only once..never even had to tinker with anything.
I remember having harder times with Ubuntu or Manjaro like a decade ago..even had freaking issues with Mint, it's crazy.
I never cared for gendered roles as a child but I distinctly remember how often I would get laughed at or pointed out as strange for it, or even pressured by other children and some adults. I also remember observing other children feeling miserable because they failed to be boy/girl enough in some activities, or that somehow I was the only one who could spend time with both girls and boys, other children in my school always stayed with their own gender, and always had weird talks about the opposite gender as if they couldn't understand each other wich made no sense to me.
Because of that I managed to grow up with an early notion that gender is an ideal that doesn't fully apply to anybody, regardless of how much they think it does, that it's somekind of weird social norm. I was relieved when we studied it later in high school, while some of my classmates had their mind blown I was only thinking «okay it's not some weird secret only I know» xD
But it's only when I was 25 that a friend told me I must be agender, so yeah maybe I realised some things quite early in life but nothing was perfectly clear to me nonetheless.
EndeavourOS is a good choice. I hopped from Manjaro to Endeavor myself a few years ago, never had an issue since. It's the kind of distro you set up once and then it's all done, you can forget about it, so much so that I hope I won't have to install it on another machine soon..because I really don't remember much about what I did back then xD
«What's the worst that could happen?» 😂