Imo immutable distros are what’s paving the future. Personally I’m a debian fangirl, but if you want to learn something new then I’d take a look towards these, otherwise you’re essentially just configuring all the things the same ways as before, which is fine but I think we’re moving away from this.
Your laptop will be fine, although it has a Nvidia graphics card so that’s always a dice roll. You probably will have problems with brightness control and sleep mode.
For your privacy goal, honestly just using a properly configured firefox on any Linux is fine. You’re already using linux, and for the rest your browser really shouldn’t leak that much info, so it’s up to the normal avenues of blocking trackers etc.