Among other things:
- Providing a better-privacy OS for Fairphones, which are very appealing for folks with certain ethical and environmental goals.
- Privacy-respecting hot spots
- I know someone who works at EFF; apparently they frequently work collaboratively with Calyx on various privacy advocacy matters and find them really helpful and great to work with.
- That explains some of the other miscellaneous things that the institute does, like providing a number of high traffic TOR exit nodes.
- Other things I’m sure I’m forgetting
There are also circumstances where one may want an alternative to Grapehene for whatever reason. For instance: five years ago when I was first considering privacy-respecting OS’s I joined both Graphene and Calyx’s Matrix communities to lurk and figure out which one to use. I hadn’t even posted anything yet when, soon after, I received a message from the moderators of the Graphene server saying that I had to leave the Calyx server or I would be banned. I wrote a message in the community asking what the hell that was all about and the founder himself responded to accuse me of being part of an organized harassment campaign and saying he had the receipts and screenshots to prove it. He didn’t provide them.
This, naturally, put me off of Graphene until he stepped away. I hadn’t installed a custom ROM in a over a decade and needed a place to ask questions. The Calyx community was wonderful.
Just because something isn’t as good as something else doesn’t mean it’s terrible, pointless trash. Graphene is the better OS and is what should be recommended on PG, but more options is a good thing. CalyxOS has its niche and the institute apparently does some good work on other privacy matters.