I first heard about /e/ back in 2019. I’d been looking for an alternative to the ‘Apploid’ duopoly for quite a few years (I had been on BlackBerry for over a decade, but we know how that turned out…), and Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism motivated me to finally find that alternative.
There were three that stood out:
- LineageOS;
- SalifishOS; and
- /e/OS
which I was intrigued about. Of course, there was also GrapheneOS, but I had a problem back then with the idea of using a Google Pixel for privacy & security 
I’m over it now, BTW, since I’ve come to understand the way that GOS operates. It’s still on my “possible” list, but users report difficulties with running many apps, so it is a backburner idea for now.
Looking for a phone that could run all of these led me to get the Sony Xperia XA2 (pioneer) in early 2019 as an experimental device, so I investigated the install instructions for all of these. It turns out that this was necessary, since it took a long time to finally put together the instructions from Sailfish and Lineage to get LOS onto it first, then eOS at last, in Mar 2020. The drivers were the problem on a Windows machine.
I’ve been using it ever since, and recently re-flashed to 1.1-r. The driver issue no longer applies since I am now on a Linux machine. I am very happy with the eOS philosophy and the whole ecosystem it has, but I am even more looking forward to the day when the backend eCloud moves to fully zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption. The lack of this is, at the moment, my main concern, especially given recent errors that have led to user data being accidentally exposed. Best to make such mistakes irrelevant entirely.