If you want to trade away the benefits of that security model to be able to tinker with things and feel more in control of your phone, you can use something else that lets you do that by default, or patch and build a rootful Graphene yourself. Ironically, the risk there is of giving full control of your phone and privacy to a potential malicious third party anyways, but different threat models may deem that acceptable or low-risk enough.
but desktop OSes function fine giving users root abilities.
Again, threat models. They may function fine for most people, and for most people the risk is low, but the linux desktop world is a security nightmare.
This isn’t about the user being treated as untrustworthy or as less than an adult, it’s about the security model GrapheneOS is based on. The team explains it well in this thread: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/18953-why-the-stigma-against-rooting
If you want to trade away the benefits of that security model to be able to tinker with things and feel more in control of your phone, you can use something else that lets you do that by default, or patch and build a rootful Graphene yourself. Ironically, the risk there is of giving full control of your phone and privacy to a potential malicious third party anyways, but different threat models may deem that acceptable or low-risk enough.
Again, threat models. They may function fine for most people, and for most people the risk is low, but the linux desktop world is a security nightmare.