All of the distros I mentioned have security issues (to varying degrees) which are non-existent or not as bad on Fedora. At least 2/4 of the distros have privacy issues including both Ubuntu and yes, Zorin OS:
The Software store allows you to install apps from the Zorin OS & Ubuntu APT repositories, Flathub, and the Snap Store out of the box.
Quoting my previous reference:
- Snapd
Ubuntu pushes snapd heavily, which tracks the user using a unique ID. You can read more about it here: Get snap metrics - Snapcraft 8.10.2 documentation
Each snapd instance has its own id, and this id can then be used to track which snapd packages are installed by a user. This cannot be turned off and does not repsect the telemetry settings in the OS. The only way to get rid of this is to remove snapd itself.
We cannot reasonably expect a new user to Linux to be aware of this and to remove snapd themselves. Even if they were to remove snapd, Canonical likes to put snap packages into the .deb package repository. An example of this can easily be found here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1185091/why-apt-package-chromium-browser-installs-snap-package-instead. On Ubuntu, you can accidently reinstall snapd and a snap package when you are trying to install a .deb package from the main repositories if you don’t pay attention. Once again, we cannot reasonably expect a new user to notice/understand this.
Removing snapd without installing replacement software would at best ruin the experience for new users and at worst also ruin their security. The Ubuntu Store itself is a snap package, so it would be removed along with snapd. The store itself, besides package management, also handles firmware updates. The user has to install gnome-software and fwupdate via the command line afterwards to replace the snap store. It can be expected that a lot of users will forget to install fwupdate.
So yeah, I could’ve been more specific about what applies to which distro, but I’m not wrong.