Yeah I tried out Origami I just felt the philosophy for the distro is a little strange lol. Cosmic itself was nice, it ran way snappier than GNOME and KDE on one of my really old computers, so thats interesting

you can layer vpns via rpm-ostree install [.rpm location]

fedora distros have a thing called countme that pings their servers so they can measure general trends in how many people are using the OS and the various spins, which can be helpful for determining what to focus on. some amount of the userbase opt out of it

could be bazzite users are more/less likely to take the hardware survey or are likely to opt out of countme.

iirc it doesnt track ip, it just sends a ping for counting, the unique ID is when you installed your distro. its easy to opt out of. in the past it used IP but they changed it because they didnt like the privacy implications of it. regardless, you should use secureblue if you want a fedora atomic image focused on privacy and security. personally i consider the risk of being included in the count negligible (and on par with pinging timeservers imo, so unless youre making your computer completely silent its kinda nonsensical to worry about) so i keep it running. you still ultimately pull data from fedora/bazzite servers for updates (and thus, show IP) so i dont really understand consternation over this.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/counting/

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/infra/sysadmin_guide/dnf-counting/