Attention Ubuntu users if you haven’t heard about it. There is currently a problem with the update, which is why it is stopped: Release Manager Simon Quigley on Reddit.

It has less to do with people than with jurisdiction. The US administration can demand to do this or that on US soil and the maintainer, owner, programmer has little chance to do otherwise if he/she does not want to end in the prison. Hence, my opinion to choose distro with as least as possible influence by the US.

No. SUSE has ties in the US. There are many in the list which are not totally off the US, because either several servers or maintainers or their main distro (Arch, Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, RedHat) is located in the US or has strong ties in the US. The few in the list which may stand out a bit are VoidLinux (community based and mainly in Europe), Crux (community, mainly Europe, but this distro is a tough one), and Alpine (small group mostly in Europe). With Kali I am not sure. If you won’t stay outside the US, have safety, but sacrifice new hardware, look also at OpenBSD.

AFAIK depends OpenSUSE on the company SUSE, which - though based in Germany - has partners and hence ties in the US.

IMHO it is at first much more important that the distribution is running well, is safe, and gets the required support so that it can establish itself among the many distros and remains for many many years an entirely European distro! I do not care in the beginning if it is called Donald Duck OS, mc2 Linux or whatever.

Don’t tell that you need so much time to write an email 😳