I've seen Fedora being widely recommended among the Linux distros. Sadly, there are many problems that come with Fedora. A lot of this information might be a bit hard to find so I wanted to put everything I found in one place.
- Fedora is (kind of) owned by Red Hat (IBM).
Red Hat sponsors Fedora. They own and pay for the infrastructure used for all the Fedora-related things. They own the Fedora trademark and logo. Big decisions are made by the FESCo. While the committee itself is elected by Fedora community, they're pretty much just exclusively Red Hat employees (for F41 elections all 5 of elected candidates work at Red Hat). I'm not going to talk about what-ifs much here, but if there would ever be a divide between what RH wants and what community wants, you can see it being an issue.
- US laws and Fedora
Fedora has to follow the US law. In practice, we have seen what that means a while ago, when they had to remove support from some multimedia codecs due to the US patent laws. Since then, basic functionalities like video playback in a web browser/video player have been broken, so for example you can't play Twitch videos "by default" in Fedora, since the codecs are missing (youtube works as they use av1). To circumvent it, you either have to use third party repos or flatpak.
- Fedora Export Control Policy and it's consequences
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/export/ Yet another US law that Fedora has to adhere to. Basically, if you live in a country that the USA treats as an enemy, you should not use Fedora. This is yet another one that was actually applied in real life and resulted in basically kicking out a longtime contributor because he had the misfortune of being born in the wrong country. You can read all about in on that person's blogpost:
https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2021/us-restricted-free-software/
I agree with this although really all Linux distros have to follow US laws to various extents as they are available across borders. Almost all linux distros are international projects with contributors everywhere, but the jurisdiction where the project is hosted is what most matters for the legal side.
We shouldn't fall into the trap of "nationalising" linux projects too much though - being based somewhere does not mean owned by or controlled by those countries. These are international collaborative projects and not reflections of geopolitics. They still follow open source licensing. However I do share the jurisdiction concerns about the US which have gotten even worse in the last few months.
On my main PC I personally use OpenSuSE which is based in Germany. However I do have a living room PC running Nobara based on Fedor (both US based) - I dont intend to change that at the moment but the current US government behaviour has made me more wary.
Some alternatives: Linux Mint is based in Ireland, and it is derived from Ubuntu, which is based in London. Personally I'm not a fan of Snap or the commerical side of Ubuntu but I've previously used Mint and still use it happily on some VMs.
Manjaro is "developed" in Austria, France and Germany according to its site, with a legal entity in Europe, and it's based off Arch which distrowatch lists as originating in Canada.
Other elements - I use KDE for my desktop which is legally based in Germany too. The GNOME foundation is based in California, USA. Again both are open source collaborative projects so where they are based legally may not matter. Also distros take their code and package it themselves. Plus projects can move and be forked should the need arise.
Personally I'm into the buy European movement in terms of avoiding US companies but at the moment I'm not changing my linux habits. But awareness is important particularly given the US approach to global law and order now.
Distrowatch.com does provide the origin / base country of each distro if people feel more strongly about moving away from US based linux distros.
+1 for Manjaro. Best distro I've found for real time audio work.