I want to believe this, but it's hard for me to take this at face value. It's been about 4 years since I've run pmOS, so my experience IS very out of date, but I also have a hard time believing that the experience has radically changed in the meantime.

The short is that yes the GNOME/KDE apps do often look more impressive, but they suffer the same sort of malaise which seems to have infected Linux desktops sometime since Eternal September, and between the sporadic crashing and "this doesn't feel right", it's really hard for me to accept "It's more polished than AOSP!".

pmOS's installation page opening with a warning:

   Make sure you read state of postmarketOS before installing postmarketOS. 

Which leads to a page that opens with:

  The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for everyone, but we are not there yet. Usability and most importantly stability issues need to be worked out first. If you are looking for an OS that is as usable as iOS or Android, this project is currently not for you.

Does not do a lot to dissuade my skepticism. I know you said the apps specifically, but even there, it's like... I dunno.

I tried getting it to run on a Pixel 3a and struggled for hours, eventually gave up (albeit I tried running it with Wayland and Niri which seems less tried-and-true).

More like OEMs need to take security more seriously and add in the capable hardware and commit to firmware updates long term.

Those Razr phone updates need to start landing sooner ....

They can't due to the shortcomings of the hardware (why develop a hardened os to the grossly insecure hardware) or the vendor (no/slow updates, etc).

Anyone is free to fork, add the desired hardware support and flash.

(that's aside of some Moto flagships in 2027)

> Oracle was a mighty powerhouse

It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.

Google's Android customers are phone OEMs. The major ones seem to like how things are going. Until Samsung and whomever start the OpenHandset Foundation or some such and fork Android, there's never going to be the Mariadb of Android.

Android has free and open artificial pancreas that is still easy to install and keeps us with complex type 1 diabetes alive.

Google may just want to kill us and Apple don't even let this kind of software exist without massive hurdles...

Because it's much worse (for me).

However at this point, as a GrapheneOS user if I couldn't use it for any reason I'll go to iOS (even though I used it for a couple of years and I've been fed up).

If the hardware security is on par with iPhone / pixel 8+, then sure.

Otherwise there's no need for NSA backdoors (as Cellebrite matrix shows) :)