Im considering buying a new phone and i don’t really consider a Pixel. I really like Fairphones approach, with the self repairable stuff. Even though they don‘t have a headphone jack. But well… I can’t change it. I’ll definitely go with the adapter over wireless headphones.
But to my question: What private OSes are there? Fairphone sells FP4s with eOS, how is that? And does it work on the FP5? GrapheneOS only works on Google Pixels right?
There are only a few to consider. /e/os if you want it easy or DivestOS if you want it most secure and private. All the other possibilities have disadvantages compared to these.
Please be aware that you should buy FP5 as FP4 has huge hardware issues and the support is a dissapointment. And yes, /e/ is available for FP5 (but not via easy installer, but it’s not hard to flash it yourself)
/e/ is announced as ‘degoogled’ but that’s not 100 % true (and not nearly as well). For example MicroG connects to Google as well as connectivity backup check. Patch level is far behind AOSP. The App Lounge uses clean APK for some apps which is very risky. Communication is a problem and they do not react like they should for example when Mike Kuketz analysed /e/ and found several problems.
The community is huge and they support many devices.
DivestOS is better in most points but is managed by one person alone. MicroG is not included by default (if you need it) and multi sim support is a problem.
You can disable microg connecting to google servers, but basically you get a standard gms free experience, with most apps simply not working from play store. They list in the wiki how and why they connect to google: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Google-Network-Connections
A completely google free experience would be unusable for “normal” people, so they somewhat right as they target “normal” users. I also don’t like /e/, but because they are deliberately obfuscating a lot of things in their documentation, and they try to sell their os as something genuine, but it’s mostly just AOSP with microG.