More I'm not managing to save any money and FOSS projects are low-hanging fruit. But then I did the math and they're more of a low-hanging blueberry than a low-hanging apple.
I use Commonwealth Bank. It works fine on GrapheneOS, no popups.
You could always just use the browser version of the banking app.
Bank Australia is the bank you should probably use, regardless of the app situation, since it's not for-profit (I haven't switched because I'm waiting for Visa and Mastercard to differentiate themselves on censorship (not that I actually care about the issue)).
I bricked my mother's computer (tried to create a USB backup, Windows 10 froze 80% through, cutting power corrupted the GPT partition table). She agreed to use Fedora Workstation on it so I tried to install it but it wouldn't detect the drive after I ran basically every command in System Recovery Linux from a USB in an attempt to fix it.
We've concluded the laptop is done for. Thankfully I had just bought a used laptop for $40 (Toshiba Satelite Pro U500) that I had no actual use for (I just thought it was neat). Unfortunately it came with Windows 10 and unlike Windows 11, Windows 10 is good enough. I put the change to Linux on hold until after Windows 10 extended support ends in October next year.
I should really set up unattended updates on my own PC.
As for what you might have missed, as much as I hate GNOME it's pretty solid for a casual user (especially from the Apple ecosystem). Not that it really matters. Also, you should go in and enable the firewall. Linux Mint for some reason installs with the firewall completely open by default IIRC.
I'm probably gonna go for Fedora or OpenSUSE. I like CachyOS because it's just plug and play, but the article says that Arch derivatives tend to be insecure because they're behind the curve on updates.
I'd rather not use an American distro but all the instructions for installing software are usually for Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora, or Arch.
None of my friends use Signal, so I'm in four group chats where I'm the only member (Journalists from The Atlantic notwithstanding). One is for transferring files between devices, one is for notes, one is for reminders, and one is for frequent backups of things like my browser bookmarks.
The people that say this probably never upgraded from Windows 10. Nobody who uses Windows 11 likes Windows (except my friend who works in software development, I don't know what's going on in his head).
The reason I got GrapheneOS over other alternatives to Android was because I thought it had something like 1% of the overall smartphone market (source: wikipedia).
Seems like a perverse incentive if you ask me, but it's not like I haven't done the same thing with a browser extension one time.