If you are going to use Tor, use it in TAILS (
https://tails.boum.org/ ) -- otherwise you are just waiting to shoot your self in the foot. As for the security of Tor its self (i.e. not the security of the O.S. or other programs, which are commonly the culprit behind Tor "vulnerabilities"), it is very good, even against governments. It is feasibly possible to "deanonymize" someone Tor given enough computational power and money though there are much easier ways to "deanonymize" a Tor user (no one practices perfect OPSEC).
An LVM on LUKS installation of Debian (
https://www.debian.org/ -- see
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1205372 on how to do that ) should be pretty secure (note that this doesn't mean that the programs you decide to run within Debian are secure, and "secure" programs used incorrectly can become insecure) while still being easy to use, though this assumes that the attacker doesn't have physical access to your machine and that your are never fooled into somehow lessening your security.
Now you say you are into "internet privacy" which has more to do with your browsing habits than your O.S. or even your Internet browser in some cases. Do you use Google? Well stop, use DuckDuckGo or Startpage as rokytnji said. Do you visit sites that use google-analytics and the like (the answer is yes because you are on linuxquestions.org )? If so then use noscript (
http://noscript.net/ ) to disable scripts, if no then still use noscript. Firefox has many insecure default settings (see "about
:config" here:
http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24722 ). You you communicate through untrusted lines (e.g. email)? Then use gpg4usb (
http://www.gpg4usb.org/ -- to see how RSA asymmetric encryption works, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXB-V_Keiu8 ) and get the other person to use it to.
I could go on and on and on and on. Internet privacy is very hard and will take a lot of work. There are many practices that are essential in some situations and suicidal in others (e.g., logging into your Facebook account on Tor). It can be very confusing and I would hate to give your misinformation or truthfully state something that is ambiguous to you and cause you to make a fatal error in privacy.
I would suggest you install Debian as your O.S. in an Encrypted (LUKS) LVM (practice installing this in a virtual machine until you can do this!), use gpg4usb in email communications, use Firefox (i.e. Iceweasal) with noscript for Internet activity where you identify your self somehow (i.e. any site that you login to) or when visiting something that could be associated with (e.g. a web page with family pictures) and Tor within TAILS for browsing web-pages that would not be associate with you or are too generic to be traced back to you (be very careful to not reveal anything about your self at all when using Tor).
Note that while eavesdroppers can't see what sites you are visiting with Tor, they can tell that you are using Tor, and note that metadata is very rarely encrypted and when it is, usually not in a government proof way either due to weak math used or more likely a compliant key-holder. It is usually impossible for you to encrypt your own metadata your self, and it is metadata that the NSA mostly collects.
EDIT: Good point 273. Anonymity is hard.
