If you need GrapheneOS, that is right.
But if LineageOS or eOS is sufficient for you, Fairphones are a solid option with long term support.

And in the long run, GrapheneOS might also have to look for other options, as the good developer support for new Pixel devices will not be given any more.

I don’t think fairphones are directly available in the US, but in principle they should work in the local 5G networks without problems.

Pixel’s aven’t the first choice for custom ROMs any more anyway, as Google recently has stopped making the device trees public for developers.
So say hello to Fairphone and similar companies, that are still caring about openess!

One thing is certain:
The day the related news story got viral, champagne corks must have been flying in the marketing department at GrapheneOS…

Well, in my region it typically is already sufficient to look Arabic to become the guest of a “random” police control.

Compared to that, having a closer look at people running GrapheneOS on their phones sounds relatively well-grounded and almost reasonable.
At least not totally crypto-racist (although I have the feeling that still comes on top…)

Thanks!
Turns out that OPs heading is a little bit exaggerated, as nobody is confiscating anything.

I do know, but I also refuse to do OPs work for him.

Would be minimal effort to post a link together with a click-baity (and wrong - nobody is confiscating anything) heading.

What? Sauce?

Oh my god, I totally love that news report!
Has some distinct Monty-Python-vibes!

Can someone please elaborate on the exploding whale?
Wikipedia is unusually cryptic on the subject in the article and Youtube won’t let me open the linked videos for some reason…

I guess this also must be an additional layer of hellfire for dyslexics…

Do you not tab-complete your commands?

Sure I do (although nowadays Strg-r does most of the heavy lifting for me), but as a decent touch-typist I am often faster directly typing short commands, like passwor… damn, I mean: passwd ;-)

You might be right.
I am German and never had a problem with pwd… The “double-you” certainly breaks some easy phonetic connections you would otherwise just make…

But the only command that I have to look up every damn time, although it has no abbreviation at all, is useradd.
Oh no, wait, I mean adduser!
… No, wait again… aah…

Now this looks like an interesting read. Thanks!

On a side note:
I hate it that the password-change command is minimally abbreviated to “passwd”.
Come on, making it much more complicated to remember and saving just two freakin letters??

Well, my KDE-based distro on my 10-year-old cheapo (350€) laptop feels snappier than Win11 on my brand new 1500€ work-laptop.
Admittedly, there are some company specific things like security scanner apps (and the mandatory MS-Office behemoth…) that are not present on the Linux-machine, but it is still a 20-core/64GByte high end machine behaving more sluggish than a 2-core/8GByte totally outdated potato…
So, I am not really surprised about OP’s snappiness observation.