Nope, pretty normal. You’ll find that you’ll need frontends and proxies for tons of things. For example Instagram hasn’t ever worked for me with a VPN. I no longer have an account anyway, but for the times someone sends me a link I’ve had to find sites that let you view the content without actually visiting Instagram. Same with reddit, reddit frontends are very good these days (I’d recommend any Redlib instance). Also, sometimes a specific VPN server is IP blocked and you can just connect to a different server to view a web site that blocked you initially. It is a fair amount of work, but honestly its helped me slow down my consumption of random bullshit anyway haha. I use ProtonVPN and pay for premium.

NVIDIA definitely has stability issues, newest drivers still kernel panic on resume from suspend. Only thing more you can do is try to capture debug logs with nvidia-bug-report.sh (I go in during a crash via SSH, usually the system is still responsive for a little while after), and post it to the NVIDIA Linux forums. They do actually seem to use the feedback there, NVIDIA reps respond from time to time and say they’ve submitted bug reports from the feedback. Otherwise, after that yeah you just do what you have to do for a usable system and wait…

Invidious, one good instance is https://iv.nowhere.moe/

My experience so far as a new user, which might be a little redundant but here goes:

• Overall, there is a balance to work out between security, decentralization and FOSS, and anonymity.
• for the average user, using sandboxed google play is pretty much essential. Otherwise you’ll spend days trying to figure out why you aren’t getting notifications, why certain integrations aren’t working, etc. Notifications especially are just painful without google FCM. HOWEVER, I do not believe it is mandatory to sign in to your Google account for notifications to work, so you could in theory avoid signing in at all and still take advantage of FCM.
• multiple profiles don’t make sense for my use case (and possibly most people). Graphene does advertise the use case of having banking apps on a separate profile, but after attempting to do just that I believe it is a very niche use case that would actually benefit from it. Obviously a great tool to have for privacy and security, but not something you’ll went to use everyday.
• For the move away from Imessage, it is indeed kinda painful and still ongoing. The simple fact is that people are super weird about switching from I message, and honestly going straight to Signal was a no-go for many of my contacts. I’ve had to settle for WhatsApp, Telegram, and even Discord… I just have had to accept that the transition will take time. I’ve weighed that privacy issue against the privacy gain of GrapheneOS itself, and the benefits of supporting a 3rd party OS option, and I still believe using Graphene is better overall. And, once people get used to using a 3rd party app vs Imessage, in a couple years the jump to Signal will be no problem at all.
• banking apps are super painful. That being said, here is an opportunity to vote with your wallet… Support apps that don’t require invasive system access for “security”. For me, the biggest eye opener was that there are NO GENERIC THIRD PARTY TAP TO PAY PROVIDERS IN THE US. It is only Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, or Google Wallet. And, as is pointed out on the Graphene user guide, 3rd party apps are allowed to implement their own NFC payment system, but the extremely vast majority simply choose to use Wallet or Apple Pay. This is obviously rather scary as more and more retailers use these systems, and I’ve realized I would gladly support and use any alternative at this point. Without Graphene, I would have never even thought about it.

What are you using for the Unified Push setup? I tried using ntfy and could never get notifications to come through on GrapheneOS

I am so old

Because beginners have no idea about OS architecture concepts. If they are a true beginner coming from Windows or MacOS they may not understand things like the Linux boot process. Of course they can read the Arch install procedure which I’ve heard is excellent, but many people are easily intimidated by documentation and often view computers as a tool that should just work out of the box without them needing to understand it. Mint is an attempt at making that happen. Obviously, once you start to modify your Mint install alot you are going to run into issues, and a highly modified or customized system is where distros like Arch and Tumbleweed actually become easier to maintain. I’d argue Mint is a natural first step to the Linux pipeline. People who only need a web browser will probably stop there, while others will continue to explore distros that better fit their needs.