Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.

If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)

But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.

This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.

For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*

I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)

OP specifically said they don’t want to dual boot, and I honestly understand why they would say that.

When you dual boot you need to worry about what bootloader is in use and how it is set up. You might find yourself in a situation where you later decide to move fully to Linux and use the old Windows drive as storage but you can’t because if you wipe it then everything stops working.

Windows has even been known to destroy dual boot setups occasionally during Windows updates.

All very solveable if you have the right knowledge, but if you want to keep your life simple then swapping hardware has guaranteed safety (nothing can go wrong with the contents if a drive if it’s not plugged in, after all) and it’s very predictable and understandable.

Just for clarity, Graphene doesn’t provide a “neutered” version of play services - the version of play services which runs is the same code as provided by Google, with the only difference being that it runs in a sandbox which only grants it the same level of permission as normal apps (which you can choose to grant or not) rather than running as effectively root on your device like it does on most android phones.

Docs: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play

Every major shift in how media is consumed has always come because of evolutions in the technology used to deliver it - going from just a few broadcast channels, to cable, to “on demand” cable and satellite, and finally to Internet delivery.

And it’s just really hard to imagine what delivery technology could provide any new capability beyond the always-on, bidirectional, high capacity data stream in your pocket that is the Internet we now have.

With streaming we’ve already achieved what should in theory be the best way to watch - and with the studios all having their own streaming platform now, there’s not even any middleman to undercut anymore, like there was when the cable companies were cut out by Netflix at the dawn of streaming. This is endgame.

The only thing left now is enshittification.

The one thing that could save us from this fate is if new programs and content are produced that are competitive in quality with what the current giants are putting out, giving people other places to go and forcing competition.

This is what we’ve already seen with indie studios and single developers disrupting the games industry, and perhaps with ever more achievable 3D animation, AI and other accessible production techniques we’ll start seeing this disrupt the film and TV industry too.

Just because something always used to be some way doesn’t mean it’s automatically acceptable.

TV might have been designed for the ad break but what if it wasn’t? You give Star Trek as an example, and here in the UK growing up I watched TNG episodes on BBC2, which is a tax-funded station without adverts. Did the lack of adverts make my childhood TNG experience worse? Personally I’d say it made it better.

Even in the cable TV age, to have adverts in something you are paying for is still horrible, and to me it’s unacceptable.

I will do everything in my power to not expose my brain to a barrage of advertising, and that includes not using any service where I have to subject myself to it.