Use “free” Google services so that any pseudo-governmental entity can get full access to your mails, backups, photos, contacts, location … but worry about stuff in device memory. Yes. A sane approach.

Thank you! Precisely my thoughts. I was a paying Kagi customer for a year, but compared to e.g. Brave’s on search index, their results were not vastly superior. I never got into using all those fancy search !bangs or custom prioritizations for individual sites and >90% of their changelog updates in that 1 year were about which additional new LLM was now also available for Ultimate Tier customers - but I didn’t come to Kagi for LLM assistants. That’s didn’t use to be their value proposition.

As long as I can still customize Gnome with some extensions for improved focus, it’ll stay my DE of choice.

That’s what happens when you rehire the local DVP during reunification.

A Knippix Kombi-Zange. Well played! Good tools are worth every cent.

Long-term custom ROM user here.

Regarding security: as always, it depends on your threat model. If you fear a government actor getting access to your phone, a locked bootloader won’t slow them down.

Regarding privacy: I’ve had both VPN logs and external Wireshark running against traffic going in&out of my custom ROM phones & sometimes I still do it for fun. If you know what you’re getting into (e.g. LoS still using some Google services) then a Custom ROM usually holds far fewer surprises than some questionable OEM ROM (and which is terrifyingly scarce regarding changelogs while still having OTA update power).

tl;dr: stick with well-known ROMs & you get … not the best of both worlds … but a “good enough” of both worlds.