tree_bark trying to find a vendor, that sells them with graphene pre-installed
I recommend against this. Buy a normal supported Pixel from a reputable shop and follow the official GrapheneOS installation guide.
tree_bark Do the enhanced security features seriously impact ease of use?
GrapheneOS is optimized out of the box for compatibility with Android, specifically because some of the security features can expose bugs in apps and cause them issues or crashes. You can opt-in to higher security in apps you want, or opt-in for all apps and then opt-out for apps that break. The main website covers this, I don't remember which pages exactly.
tree_bark whats the vibe in relation to google's llm-based ai features? if they become more integral to android in the future, will that affect GrapheneOS?
How so? GrapheneOS is based on the open source Android code. If AI features are open sourced, I don't see a reason why they shouldn't be available to whomever wants to enable them in GrapheneOS. And all the proprietary functionality that Google adds is anyway already NOT in GrapheneOS, this isn't specific to proprietary AI features.
tree_bark the main reason I am seriously looking into custom roms is that i don't want ai features forced on me.
GrapheneOS is a top-tier professional project:
https://grapheneos.org/hiring
Enough looking at the release notes and the announcements they post on the forum and their Mastodon/X accounts should give you the idea that the people running this project are experts from the industry rather than hobbyists. This is something they've said themselves occasionally, but it's also evident to me as an outsider. And despite the nonprofit nature.
They've said they're anti-authoritarian. GrapheneOS protects your freedom and privacy through and through, by having very good security, and being neutral in allowing you to use whatever you want on top of it, with an equal level of security among all of your apps, and not pushing anything on you. Despite what I said earlier about compatibility, the security is still greatly improved even in the out of the box state. GrapheneOS is not just your best bet for security out of all alternative OSs, but also your best bet out of all OSs generally. Cellebrite reportedly can hack all phones (including iPhones) except GrapheneOS. Some other alternative OSs were caught silently and knowingly transmitting data to OpenAI (GrapheneOS has written posts about this). I recommend avoiding all these “custom Read-Only Memories”.
tree_bark Will my apps work?
Any app that's not trying to ban GrapheneOS, or alternative OSs at all, should work correctly. The main way it happens is by apps using the misnamed Play Integrity API. But some banks and games do some stupid “security” checks that detect certain idiosyncrasies of GrapheneOS as signs of a research/emulated environment for “cheating”/“tampering”/etc. One feature that has idiosyncrasies is the secure app spawning feature, which GrapheneOS have said they want to improve in order to mimic Android. To be clear, the feature is coded correctly, but these apps incorrectly depend on implementation-specific details.
tree_bark keep playing my balatro save file (i bought it in the play store)
I think Balatro uses the aforementioned Play Integrity API to block GrapheneOS players. There's previous threads here about Balatro. You could ask the people there how it's going now.
tree_bark microg
I believe MicroG isn't usable on GrapheneOS. It aims to reimplement Google Play, but GrapheneOS doesn't allow apps to have privileged access, so if MicroG uses privileged access for anything, that wouldn't work.
The GrapheneOS team have said somewhat recently that they want to patch a minor vulnerability created by a combination of the lack of Google Play integration in GrapheneOS allowing you to install alternative reimplementations (or malicious fake versions), together with Google libraries embedded in third-party apps blindly assuming that the installed Google Play implementation is Google's. It'd be nice to see them patching this, but this might further harm the use of MicroG on GrapheneOS.
tree_bark aurora? for my
Aurora Store has some issues, including security issues, although it has some legitimate uses, and it should still be relatively fine to update existing apps without installing new apps, because installed apps have their signing key pinned — all updates have to be signed by the same key as the installed version.
I recommend against logging into your personal Google account on unofficial Google apps (such as MicroG and Aurora Store).
tree_bark i read that graphene reccommends a vpn and dns blocking, but does that mean i need
You don't need anything. GrapheneOS doesn't limit what DNS/VPN/ad-blocking options you can use on it compared to standard Android. There's ad blocking apps that should be perfectly usable, and they'd have the same security risks on GrapheneOS as they have on Android — specifically, I think they require some dangerous permissions. DNS and VPN don't require granting any permissions, so they're more secure. And DNS is quite easy to set, no need to install an app.
tree_bark i'm down to try out Vanadium, but i really need an ad-blocker
Vanadium has a built-in ad blocker (very simple, no configuration), it appears as an Ads website permission inside Vanadium. You can toggle it as a whole on/off for all sites, and toggle it per-site. Vanadium also has built-in support for DNS-over-HTTPS independent of the DNS settings in the OS.
tree_bark how complicated is the different profile setup?
I recommend avoiding multiple user profiles. They have weird non-obvious things about them.
tree_bark how easy is it to (…) re-install pixel android?
You will lose all data. GrapheneOS includes its own kinda-broken open source encrypted backups app, and stock Android has proprietary backup support through the Google account. They're incompatible. (Additionally, Google Play is sandboxed on GrapheneOS so it can't read or write other apps' private data to back them up or restore them (respectively).)
tree_bark the first non-handmedown smartphone i ever had was the first fairphone and i still love the repairability of that design. but because they couldn't get the security keys for their hardware and i couldn't afford a new phone, i was stuck forever on android without security updates.
Fairphone has awful security and provides false EOL dates. GrapheneOS publishes the EOL dates in their FAQ pages, and they've written about Fairphone's awful security in the past. (I'm not sure what security keys and hardware you're talking about.)
tree_bark my second choice is probably getting a 3rd gen iPhone SE . i'd honestly much rather stick with an android rom
The second most secure option after GrapheneOS is iPhone. Stock Android is more secure than all these awful “custom Read-Only Memories”. All of these are things the project has written about in the past, you can look it up if you're interested.
tree_bark is there any good written or video tutorials for first time users?
I think the video by Linus Tech Tips is a pretty good overview.