I keep my files in a repo on gitlab and use yadm to sync them.

Yadm is a wrapper around git, so you have all the standard git commands plus some extra to work with templating and encryption etc.

If you don’t want something completely different, PopOS is a great, snap free, distribution based on Ubuntu. It’s what Ubuntu should have been.

And in addition to their terrible UX, they are also horrible software maintainers. This will definitely rot over time.

Flight data is public so anyone meaning to do harm can already access the data.