are pinebooks even meant for regular use?

ransomware might encrypt your home directory

It doesn’t, the os is immutable and just based on Arch. Arch is counted separately in the Stream hardware survey too.

Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, atomic Fedora based like Bazzite, (maybe Nix, Void, Clear Linux)

should all work fine. I wouldn’t recommend any distros with an update period of over 6 months like Debian or Ubuntu LTS though. Easiest way yo get going would probably be either Fedora KDE Spin or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.