Old Vivaldi user here. Vivaldi is quite lacking in privacy, and chromium made it worse to use over the years. I would not recomend it.

You would be better off with Librewolf, if you want a more fancy fork you can try Floorp (silly name I know), it’s quite similar to Vivaldi regarding customisation and options.

Or you could try Zen…but as far as I am aware it’s still in alpha, lack some options, especially regarding privacy so may be not the best (you can still edit the about:config though). I keep trying it again and again, only to be disapointed because it’s still too fresh.

Being halfway between both sides

People really need to stop playing devil advocate, «Especially in light of the enshittification of everything lately». Mozilla has gone downhill for a good while now, being gentled by sweet Google money and spending it in trends far too late only to waste it, employees keep getting fired while the CEO gets a regular raise and Firefox barely got improved over the years. And now they want to jump head first into AI, way too late again, all the while we already know all AI compagnies run at a tremendous loss. Can you even call that « trying to sustain itself» at this point ? Seems surreal to me.

All I really see is another breach of trust in a full history of mistakes, probably the last one.

EndeavourOS is a good choice. I hopped from Manjaro to Endeavor myself a few years ago, never had an issue since. It’s the kind of distro you set up once and then it’s all done, you can forget about it, so much so that I hope I won’t have to install it on another machine soon…because I really don’t remember much about what I did back then xD