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/).

Same. A bit of flack around some of the communities here if you use brave though.

Pi-hole doesn’t stop YouTube ads in my experience. I use it. But I layer other things on it like ublock or Brave (please don’t hate for Brave, it just works across mobile and desktop for me).

Edit: pihole is dns blocking and ublock or things like it are element blocking in the browser. They are both good at what they do. Just different about how they do it.

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.