I cannot, in good conscience, recommend a project with a lead that is as verbally abusive and utterly unable to appreciate even highly constructive criticism as Micay, technical merits notwithstanding. I am fine when others recommend it though.
Let’s call a spade a spade: He is a raging asshole with severe clinical paranoia. I’m literally certain that if he saw this post he’d accuse me of being a shill for calyxos and to never fucking again interact with any grapheneos account. Both have happened to me before (Hence I refuse to ever interact with his troupe again, even though I use graphene and agree with the vast majority of its technical decisions; I have also stopped actively recommending it to anyone, the social media experience is simply way too attrocious).
If you can find a way, so can “the bad guys™”. If you feel charitable towards MS do a “responsible disclosure” and inform them and agree to a release embargo, so they can fix it first; If you don’t, do a “full disclosure” and just publish =^_^=
I personally favour Alpine Linux for its minimalism, but Devuan or Debian are fine, and more familiar choices, too. Depending on what you intend to run, especially appliance-like things, OpenBSD might be a good alternative.
Sure, just not something I am comfortable actively recommending myself.