Having read my share of early Soviet era sci-fi, I think you’re wrong.

Hell no. It’s nowhere near 50/50. In my experience the great moments are far more frequent than the one where you want to defenestrate them.

The relationship with them is however massively unequal, in that you basically owe all the support and they owe you next to nothing (at least at the start).

And unlike with partners and friends, you are supposed to have and maintain authority over them, and foster their growth, often against their whishes.

So it’s a lot of work. But I for instance don’t understand why people get dogs.

Cowabunga!

It is also largely questionable.

/e/OS has MicroG, and that runs as a system service. You can disable most of it, and if you’re not using any App that needs Google services, I doubt it really does much.

It is possible to use Graphene without using any Google at all. However… Doing so will break almost every app out there. Anything that needs push notifications, AndroidAuto, a thousands more things. So you end up using Graphene with Sandboxed Google services.

And we get into the debate. Is it better to take the official Google Play Services, which we all consider malicious, and run it in a sandbox, or take an open source private, and trusted implementation (MicroG) and run it as a system service?

It is at the very least largely debatable.