I went with GNOME just because I’m used to it and want stability as my main focus but I was wondering if using one DE over another can affect security or privacy at all? Or is that all dependant on the distro you are using?
TLDR; yes it does affect security. But quite likely not by any meaningful amount to be worth worrying about.
Any extra package you install is extra code on your system that has a chance to include vulnerabilities and thus could be an extra attack vector on your system. But the chances that they will affect you are minuscule at best. Unless you have some from of higher threat model then I would not worry about it. There are far more things you would want to tackle first to increase your security that have far larger effects than a second desktop environment being installed.
As far as I know, none of the major DEs have Windows-style telemetry turned on by default. So ignoring security issues and apps themselves, DEs should roughly be the same on the privacy front.
Wayland has security benefits over X11 so choosing one with a Wayland session is a good idea but other than that I’m not really aware of any breakdowns of security between DEs. My gut says the major options are pretty similar on that front, most hardening guides only mention DEs to tell you which ones support Wayland. The choices you can make to harden your system are changing things at a lower level that is entirely unrelated to your DE. That said I’m just a privacy/security interested layperson and security is a topic where you can always split more hairs if you want (or need) to.
What do you mean by privacy? If you mean like other people you may live with/come across having access to your data, the best solution is having an encrypted drive/partition. No DE or standard login is going to stop a determined threat actor from just pulling out your storage device and reading off what’s on there.
I don’t think DE really means much for security, your biggest concern is always going to be the software you run having the same privelages as you (IE filesystem access)
That question is very broad.
Yes, double the DEs installed will mean double the possibilities for vulnerabilities.
Also, I know no Linux Desktop that is actually secure. Like having a real password manager or not sharing the clipboard.
Privacy? No? But just look at what data they collecty it is harmless.
