+1 for both comments above.

Back up your current disk! If you do it properly you can always restore your current operating system if this experiment doesn’t pan out.

Fedora KDE is an excellent starter choice. The DE will feel relatively familiar coming from Windows and Fedora is very much a batteries included distro. Red Hat guides are excellent and very useful in that family.

Another one for Tuta, with addy.io as a proxy service. Nice integration with Bitwarden for making new accounts + it’s simple to make rules based on the to address for easy filtering.

Would there be any harm in using this in conjunction with something like Stirling to edit with one and read with the other?

You’re right, the server, cryptographic library, and all clients are open source.

That said, I have a few personal caveats.

1. US government funding and markings are all over Signal.
2. The official app doesn’t make it clear how to connect to a custom server. As a self hosting enthusiast myself, I only found out it was possible when checking on your claim that it’s all open source.

Kind of. Synthing-fork is alive and well.

I’m more of a dust man, myself. It runs recursively so it’s easy to pinpoint the culprit.

[Image source: the project’s README]