Felt same way about GrapheneOS but a few friends set it up so i gave it a try. It is easy to install and use. As evidence, I gave my 70 year old father one and he loves it.

When my friend was telling me about GrapheneOS I was thinking back to the old days of android custom roms, all the bugs and bullshit, the time I couldn't dial out to 911 because my custom ROM crashes when I did, or other issues. So I gave it a pass.

However he's been on it now for months and every time he shows me something on it I get a little more jealous. Everything seems to be working fine, including e.g. bank apps, and he has interesting features like some kind of app zoning thing limiting permissions on a zone to zone basis.

The only problem is it's only available on massive phones without headphone jacks and SD card slots, so I'm sticking with Xperia for now.

Breathlessly awaiting the upcoming Motorola/Graphene crossover phone.

Can you run Graphene on non Pixel phones?

Not yet. They've partnered with Motorola, though, so we'll probably be seeing some of their phones in the future that can run GrapheneOS.

You can use Lineage [/with microG]

This. For privacy, it is much better to avoid Google Play services (which are the only supported solution for push notifications in GrapheneOS).