You get a device that still runs proprietary Google blobs in privileged processes (for Play Integrity), talks a lot with Google, gives certain Google applications (like Google Maps) higher privileges than normal Android apps (you can find the signing keys of apps that get elevated privileges in the source code of the /e/OS microG fork), uploads your speech to OpenAI for speech to text, uses a shady middleman (which they do not want to reveal the owner of) for installing F-Droid apps [1], and is hopelessly behind on Linux kernel versions, firmware blobs, and Android security patches (remember that Android Security Bulletins only have backports of high/critical patches).

I wouldn't recommend anyone to use /e/OS. Either they are very incompetent or they are very shady.

[1] https://info.cleanapk.org

That link you shared in your other comment actually counters your "runs google blobs" argument.

Speech to text is afaik completely anonymized and if you care that much, it actually is possible to just not use it, rip it out or even replace it with something that runs locally in your home.

> hopelessly behind on Linux kernel versions

Can you substantiate that? Given that many OEMs still run linux 4 and 5 in their Flagship ROMs today, I'd like to see how open source does so much worse.