Interestingly the founder of the project seems to explicitly disagree with that article

Based on the community being quite succsessful so far despite being made by volunteers, I don't think they will.

Sneakernet is getting worse and worse these days, I'm learning the ancient art of astroprojecting into random people's rooms to consume media.

o7

Anna's Archive seems to be doing a good job of that

victim of properganda

At the very least, you have adequately shown me that the developer is too unstable to be able to guarantee the OS remains secure. Next time I'll use Calyx OS since they are pretty much the sane anyway.

I do want to point out that:

No, he hates them because he was mocked deservedly by Tor devs

Technically the email you linked showed that he hated TOR beforehand, then the devs (rightly) mocked his reasoning, we were both right.

[by your logic] He should make it maximum compliant with governments and spying agencies

Please do not twist my words, though I understand once you assume someone is a bad actor you (quite understandably) give up. My point is that software should not be configured to break the law by default. Why would a user want something that breaks the law when first installed, when most users want to follow the law? Ideally software like this should have separate "legally compliment" and "freedom" branches but I argue having the first one is better then the second one in most cases.

All that being said, enjoy your day

is part of the Linux kernel

Saddly no it's not, its a component embedded by the compiler that can be separately installed to replace the programs default allocator implementation. Also I can't find a fork of android I know of that supports it.

If I understand you correctly, graphene OS is bad because:

1. The developer is using his fans to market the software he helps make, resulting in more people using it.

Arguably that's a good thing as it at least makes people aware that other android forks exist, encouraging people to switch to one of the more private forks of android.

2. The developer hates Mozilla and unfairly hates TOR because he sees them as Mozilla shills.

How does the developer having bad takes effect a piece of software? Firefox in mine and others experience, still works well on the device. Yes I am aware of his vanadium project, if he wants to waste time, power to him.

3. By default the OS complies with government laws both defacto and official.

Why is that a bad thing, especially since it sounds like the alternative is breaking said laws? Yes there are often moral arguments against laws such as that, but the advantage of open source is that you can switch to something that gives you the freedom to break the law if you want.

The only thing you have shown me (which I already agreed with) is the lead developer (who is not the only one working on the project) is immature and paranoid, you have not showed why I should not use the software that he helped make, only that other forks support more hardware.

Thanks for being willing to discuss this stuff, I appreciate you are willing to take the time to write a detailed response.

So if I understand you correctly, Graphene OS does everything it says it does but overhypes its differences with other forks. That doesn't sound like snakeoil, only effective marketing.

Why shouldn't I use it over the other forks then, particularly because useful features like hardened_malloc are only avalible on Graphene despite being widely ported to linux distros?

They also do not shill for Big Tech or Google/Apple.

What's the story behind this? I'm genuinely curious.

I will say I strongly dislike how the developer has handled criticism, but that seems to be more a failing of the dev then a problem with the OS.

1. Personally I brought a .site domain from namecheep for $2 a year
2. Self hosting is cheepest but may require making a call to your service provider or using a dynamic DNS service. Personally I use vultr, though I've heard linode, Azure, google cloud and AWS are all great alternatives.
3. WordPress is a good option for setting up a website with a ton of plugins and installs available, just make sure to keep your plugins up to date
4. Make sure to secure your ssh with keyfiles instead of passwords, additionally I followed everything in this guide

You must want something if you want to stop being unhappy. What would you change in your life if given the option?

It's website seems to have had a graphic designer look over it. It seems to do the best of both worlds where you can download the default user friendly client or choose to go down the jargon route if you want to.