If you dislike telemetry,
Audacity => Tenacity
Firefox => LibreWolf or FireDragon (GraudaLinux default, good in telemetry respects IIRC)
You may like btop, Mission Control,
Avoid any terminals and editors that advertise as "AI" -- there were some big ones recently but the community thankfully overall was like nah.
Get some decent browser extensions, ublockorigin, privacy badger, libredirect
some people like to pihole their network, opensense/pfsense/ddwrt router is nice to have
AVAHI broadcasts your services on the LAN IIRC.
Obviously vscode has telemetry, if you use that try vscodium IIRC, personally I use neither but that's just me.
It may be a little too late but if you have a chance to use a feature like btrfs snapshots (+time shift) it can be a game changer.
Any time you need to do something risky to the OS you can just snapshot before like installing 1000 packages, or Nvidia driver update, you can just revert to the old working version by swapping the names on the snapshot and is subvolume.