Moving to GrapheneOS doesn’t have to be full bore. While it obviously wouldn’t be as private, you could run google services sandboxed. That restricts google quite a bit rather than giving it full rights to everything on your phone. Other features you can take advantage of are granular permissions per app and the ability to easily turn things on and off (such as mic, camera, location), restrictions to contacts, restriction to files/folders, etc… Youd be amazed how much you can clean up your exposure even with google services running. But yes, you’d need to give up using google apps like calendar for any of it to do any good.

Absolutely this. I like mint because I no longer like fiddle farting around with my PC. It just works out of the box. An overlooked bonus is when I need to learn how to do something the Mint forums usually have the answer, and its catered to Mint defaults. It’s not the end of the world, but when answers match your file explorer, text editor, system editor etc…it just makes it easier. Compared to finding answers elsewhere that are for Debian and then having to wonder if it’ll work or not based on the family lineage of the OS is just unnecessary for most people.