Essential? no.

Worth it? maybe.

Nice to have control of your own device? absolutely.

I have two devices, primary with root (through Magisk as KernelSU still has some issues for me) and secondary without root. Anytime I have to do something more demanding on the unrooted device I really wish I had root. Local terminal access, ability to disable some annoying “features” (verified app links) and multiple other things I use daily make it worth it for me.

EDIT: I saw mentions of custom roms in other comments. I have a custom rom installed (AOSP based). If I was on a stock rom (or god forbid something like MIUI) root would be a must for me.

Custom roms still offer this. Additionally you can even enable Pulse (audio visualiser) if you like.

Syncthing plays nicely with obsidian if you ever have to synchronise the vault between multiple devices.

Not so much about testing, but one time I really needed to get to my backups I lost password to the repository (I’m using restic). Luckily a copy of it was stored in bitwarden, but until I remembered it, were perhaps one of the worst moments.

Needless to say, please test backups and store secrets in more then one place.

It’s the first time I hear about resticprofile and it looks nice. So far I’ve been using crestic for configuration files. Do you know how they compare?

I love this. Thank you so much.

Redmi Note 10 Pro with custom ROM (right now A13 based SparkOS, but I switch them from time to time). I have gms installed, but there’s always an option to use vanilla version.

I’m looking to switch to LibreMobile OS (https://libremobileos.com/) for my second device, which is currently running Crdroid (also A13)