They need to self host if they want sovereignty. This thing about relying on an external service and demanding total privacy and control is irrational.
There are now arch-based distros that are quick and easy to set up, like Ubuntu. I'm currently running endeavourOS, and I am eager to try Manjaro.
Don't be put off by the Arch-based nature of the OS - since both Endeavour and Manjaro have installers, they bootstrap your system's drivers, and all.
I've found maintenance to not be too overwhelming, and Arch's wiki is top-notch. When I used other distros like Gentoo, I sometimes found myself reacing the Arch wiki...
Package management isn't too different from using apt, synaptic, or the app store if you use the right tools:
Command-line:
- Pacman: for precompiled official packages
- Yay : Automagically compiles community-ported third-party applications
GUI:
- Pamac: Look it up - it's a lot like Ubuntu's "App Store"
The caveat here is that I'm an experienced Ubuntu/Debian user that moved to Gentoo for a while.
While using Gentoo, I got tired of the systemd migration nightmare and returned to Ubuntu to find the nightmare of Snapd and poorly-sandboxed applications in their community repo.
I've only used Arch for about a month, but after using Gentoo and Ubuntu, I think I'm staying here for a while. The kernels are brand-new and the GPU driver performance is at least 2x what I was getting in Ubuntu. With the derivatives, there's no reason to bootstrap an Arch system from the kernel framebuffer, like the olden days of Gentoo and Slack.