VHS [he/him]

Yeah, that ROM doesn’t support MicroG. Graphene is more focused on being hardened for security

What ROM are you using? MicroG depends on a ROM feature called “signature spoofing” that allows it to impersonate the Play Services apps.

It’s a drop-in replacement so it should provide push notifications and location functionality just fine for every app. Other functionality such as IAPs will probably be unsupported.

From the data I see on Plexus for WhatsApp, the core functionality and notifications work just fine on MicroG, but backing up chats to Google Drive is broken.

There’s a fork of Telegram on F-droid called “Telegram FOSS” that runs a background service for notifications. I’ve used it and the effect on battery drain is pretty minor, like maybe 2% per charge. Not sure if something similar exists for Signal.

I use MicroG on my phone, it’s a basic FOSS replacement for GMS and makes push notifications work for all apps. It gets push notifs from Google’s servers but you don’t need an account. It doesn’t use Google at all for location, which is nice as that’s a highly invasive aspect of Play Services. Not all ROMs are compatible with it, I use it on Lineage

The distros such as Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu make all kinds of DEs available to the user to install. Gnome is not in charge of this, and even if they were, the suggestion that they would make other DEs unavailable is childish. You have plenty of choices