I know Qubes is ideal but what about those who don’t have the hardware or don’t want to use Qubes. What options do we have? I see Debian is approved, fedora maybe but what about OS like Arch or even better a hardened arch Linux distro? Thoughts?
Arch does not have a clean separation between free/non-free software AFAICT and standards/supervision for their community contributed packages is not as stringent as Debian official repos - which can be easier for bad actors to sneak something malicious. The rolling release dev model makes system stability problematic.
With that said they do have the best general Linux documentation out there along with Gentoo as a close second.