Lineage is kinda bad privacy and security wise, from the little I know its not fully degoogled
My understanding is kinda the opposite:
GrapheneOS ships with a sandboxed, FOSS Google Play Services which can optionally do a bunch of Google things (use their APIs, login to Google etc.) plus they have some hosted services that can substitute Google services (like geolocation).
LineageOS basically doesn't ship with any Google Play style API/frameworks at all. It's a pure AOSP experience. Any apps on F-Droid work but third party apps (like ones found on Google Play) are hit and miss. If you can just use F-Droid for all of your apps then LineageOS is probably a much more private and secure offering.
LineageOS for microG is an unofficial fork of LineageOS which includes a FOSS Google Play Services compatibility layer, a bit like GrapheneOS. As far as I know it doesn't have the same level of sandboxing as Sandboxed Google Play on GrapheneOS.
Both GrapheneOS and LineageOS publish monthly updates with upstream security patches for all supported devices.
Both GrapheneOS use network-provided DNS by default.
Apparently both GrapheneOS and LineageOS connect to connectivitytest.gstatic.com via http as a Captive Portal test by default,althoughh this was as of 2019-2020 and both might have changed since then.
Something that often gets missed is the difference between packaging conventions between distros.
For example, Debian has Apache httpd packaged as "apache2" and has wrapper scripts for enabling sites. Fedora/RHEL has "httpd" and includes conf.d from the main conf. Arch also has "httpd" but doesn't have a conf.d out of the box. Of course you can pretty much configue Apache to your heart's content and have an identical setup between all three distros.
From what I've read, Debian tends to patch and change software to fit more into their overall system whereas Fedora and Arch tend to be more upstream.
RPM and Arch both have group packages and metapackages. Debian just has metapackages AFAIK. Debian also has "recommended" and "suggested" levels of soft dependencies, the former which is enabled by default. RPM has the capability for weak dependencies but AFAIK most RPM distros don't use it. Arch doesn't have soft/weak dependencies AFAIK.
When you install a new system daemon on Debian, it's generally enabled and started by default, whereas RPM-based and Arch don't do that.
When I think of the base of the system I tend to think of some of those more subtle idiosyncrasies that tend to spread around the ecosystems, like Ubuntu and Debian behave quite similarly for instance.
I much prefer Librewolf. They are a little more transparent about it is, an independent, open source repackaging of Firefox with Arkenfox(ish) patches applied to it, rather than an entity which signs up for deals with other businesses.
Bash scripts will only get you so far and I can wholly recommend Ansible for automation.
Basically the main advantage of Ansible is that its builtin tasks are "idempotent" which means you can re-run them and end up with the same result. Of course it is possible to do the same with bash scripts, but you may require more checks in place.
The other advantage of Ansible is that there are hundreds of modules for configuring a lot of different things on your system(s) and most are clear and easy to understand.
I use Debian at home on my homeserver and a mix of Debian and Arch for my workstations. Most of my stuff is managed with Ansible to make rebuilding easier and most workloads in podman containers.
Personally I don't overthink the distro thing. I recently started using Arch and quite like it. I've noticed packages that are available in Debian but not Arch and vice-versa. Debian Stable is nice because it's just, well, stable.
Fedora has an annoying release cadence IMO. I have experienced desktop bugs in the early GA releases before which put me off. If I wanted instability I would sooner go with Arch (and I am yet to have many issues with Arch yet).
If I were to go with a BSD for a home server it would probably be OpenBSD or FreeBSD. OpenBSD has vmm and a bunch of tooling around it, and FreeBSD has bhyve and jails. I haven't taken the plunge because Linux works and it's what I know.
These days I hear about people using proxmox on their homeserver with LXC containers and/or VMs.
Thanks, I wasn't sure what the situation with Darwin was. Android is definitely more free than iOS, but the spirit of AOSP is dead and many of the old AOSP apps have been discontinued. For example Google no longer maintains a calendar app and so LineageOS maintains its own fork. Google's proprietary suite is front and centre of a lot of the Android distros except for LineageOS and co.
Android and iOS are walled gardens so they hardly count. Both are mostly proprietary these days with an "open core". When I think of Linux on the desktop, Linux for daily computing etc. I think of an experience that is interoperable, FOSS and respects my digital rights.
My understanding is kinda the opposite:
Both GrapheneOS and LineageOS publish monthly updates with upstream security patches for all supported devices.
Both GrapheneOS use network-provided DNS by default.
Apparently both GrapheneOS and LineageOS connect to connectivitytest.gstatic.com via http as a Captive Portal test by default,althoughh this was as of 2019-2020 and both might have changed since then.