There is Dahlia OS which looks fairly promising but development takes time and it is only a small amount of people.
I like the idea of the OS being more embedded focused like Android and Chrome OS but I don’t want Chrome or Google.
Is there anything else I should look at?
I think that is the goal of https://universal-blue.org/
I don’t play with anything Google packages with hardware. Privacy and security with google always means their privacy against their competitors and security means whomever google considers a risk. I personally view data mining and search results manipulation as digital slavery as ownership of a fundamental part of a person used to manipulate them. There are only two web crawlers and all search engines query these even if you do not use Microsoft or Google directly. Your search results will not be deterministic no matter where you search from. There is no transparency here, so your access to information, the third pillar of democracy has been compromised.
Then there is the fact that Android and Chrome OS are designed to enable hardware theft using orphan kernels.
For these reasons, I believe you are trading convince to give up your privacy entirely, sell you hardware ownership rights effectively giving up citizenship in a democracy for digital serfdom in neo feudalism. Google is the security threat and the primary cause of privacy issues, but that is just my take.
Fedora is generally a just works distro, but one where there are lots of options for various use cases. The best part is no hardware ownership scams.
Universal blue is closer to regular Linux but maybe it is still worth a look.
Also “cloud native” is a little off putting. I might just try Silverblue
Cloud native just means that it uses tools like distrobox. I have used both and ublue has way better defaults: preinstalled drivers, codecs, update tool. Aurora and Bluefin are very similar, one kde one gnome, but bazzite is pretty different, it comes with a bunch of gaming features and tools and waydroid
“Cloud Native” means uBlue’s OS images are basically Docker images, but meant tu run on bare metal instead of inside virtualization, that are built automatically with GitHub actions.
The project itself is super interesting. It’s not a distro, it’s an alternative automated build pipeline toolkit for Silverblue/CoreOS that lets anyone build their perfect atomic image. It’s still 100% Fedora+rpmfusion under the hood.
UBlue’s official images have massive quality of life improvements over Silverblue.
I’m running uBlue’s AuroraOS. Have been very happy with it so far.