If you're looking for something familiar but without the ubuntu bullshit then Mint or Pop! OS are pretty good. You can't go wrong there.
But if you're feeling spicy try Endeavor OS, it's pretty much arch but with an installer and sane defaults. Great community, rolling release. You will sometimes have to get your hands dirty with system maintenance though, as it is with arch distros.
By using a VPN you are essentially routing your internet traffic through another computer and another ISP. So you have one of the VPN provider's IP addresses. So what they have to do is find out which IP addresses are used by VPNs and block those. It's very hard, but for the biggest companies somewhat doable.
Sure.
The basic maintenance is having to update your system often. In my experience it's good practice to do it at least once every 2 weeks, or you risk having more manual interventions (like having to partial update archlinux-keyring which is used verify package signatures, it's the most common issue in my experience). That's mostly all of it.
But sometimes, you have to do some manual changes. The last big one was back in May when arch was migrating to git and you had to change your package manager (pacman) configuration. It was a simple change, basically deleting like 2 lines in your config, but if you didn't do it you'd probably end up with a broken system at some point. The manual interventions are always listed on the main arch page (link).
It's not that much work if you're into that, but it's still more than a lot of people are willing to do.
If you're somewhat knowledgeable in linux you should have no problems. The documentation is excellent and there's a big community to help if you need it. As is with most things, arch has an excellent documentation on system maintenance (link).
It's not that much work honestly. Like in May when arch was migrating to git you had to manually update your pacman config to remove the community repo, if you didn't do it at some point there'd be a risk of having a broken system. It was a simple change, basically removing a few lines from the config, but keeping up with arch "news" and sometimes having to do something simple is more than a lot of people are willing to do.
There are some arguments when it comes to immigration policies (refugees). But looking at data of support of the EU - looks like a loud minority.
I think it's great.
For all the hate that the EU gets, I really appreciate that they won't bend over for corporate overlords when in comes to privacy.