Every time I want to install LineageOS on a device because it's been abandoned by the manufacturer, it's also been abandoned by LineageOS, leaving me with some random custom rom as only option.
It is great to have a degoogled phone. Then the lack of a card slot annoys you and the desire to just plug in an aux cable and have sound anywhere without a dongle comes to the fore.
I wish they would just commit to also support the Motorola G Stylus line. The G Stylus 2024 was a great phone.
One of the first versions of LineageOS I used was Evolution X on my Moms old OnePlus phone since it wasn't supported by the "official" Lineage version. Great track record of almost daily updates, and the customization you could do with it was phenomenal. The funny thing was I was running Ubuntu Touch on it before and it was super sluggish (totally not expecting that tbh) so switched to Evolution and suddenly the same phone was really snappy and the battery lasted for almost two days.
But yeah, I'm not surprised many installs are just branched versions of the original since many of them you can run on phones that aren't supported by the official version.
But they really hurt their credibility with the prior stance, and that their subreddit still has rules forbidding almost all discussions - interpreted as just closing all questions regarding blocked topics, like rooting, microG, Volte - is still a stain on an otherwise great project.
By now it has actually been almost two and a half years.
> But they really hurt their credibility with the prior stance, and that their subreddit still has rules forbidding almost all discussions [...].
While I'm not looking to turn this into an off-platform meta discussion, pretty much all of those rules have their very good reasons to be there.
As an example, you would be surprised how many people install a Magisk module to strip away LineageOS-specific build version properties, and then end up in our support platforms asking why the Updater can't search for new updates (of course while not mentioning that they have modified their system).
microG I don't even see listed as a part of any rule anymore, it was removed when upstream support for microG was merged.
You are correct, the microG ban is gone from the sidebar. That's nice.
(Why this was so important: During covid the official contact tracker in Germany needed microG/the play services, a newer alternative then bundled the scanner or something, so worked without. But that took time and was less official. When it becomes life and death impractical positions like that hurt).
It's okay if you dont want to discuss it. To share my position anyway: You need the option to have root so the device belongs you (and not the Rom), VoLTE is an existential threat and the ban stiffles all options to easily get information about the situation. That's the main point: Banning topics completely does only make things worse, and it is not like the project tried not to ban these topics for how many years now, a decade? An Autobot answer should suffice for making the problems known.
I can find internal conversations that it deserves to be announced in a more prominent way than on the "Sunsetting LineageOS 18.1" post, was left as "to be added to the LineageOS 22.x" blog post, and then just never made the initial draft. Whoops.
If you are talking about the rules on the subreddit (or the other social platforms), that one indeed has been discussed a lot on the platform itself (and which we usually keep available).
* root is still frowned upon
* microG is frowned upon
* bypassing SafetyNet (sorry, Play Integrity) is frowned upon
* bootloader relocking is not oficially nor semi-officially supported
* missing patches (Google's 6 month source embargo) were not talked about
That sounds more like an OEM problem.
It was so crucial to Xiaomi's userbase that they supported it with updates for almost 8 (!) years.
So yeah, sounds feasible...
Are these bot posting farms and click farms masquerading?
There are e.g. LineageOS builds for Tablets and also Smarthome devices, like the Amazon Echo Show 5, Lenovo ThinkView Displays, etc.
There's a big world out there.
Some Waydroid installations are on phones.
waydroid_x86_64 181015
waydroid_arm64 8718
waydroid_tv_x86_64 3200
waydroid_x86 1215
waydroid_arm64_only 914
waydroid_car_arm64_only 69
---
usa_total 337390Searching for "waydroid_x86_64 LineageOS 20.0" leads to a sourceforge page [0] of waydroid with LineageOS builds that have 70-80k downloads per month.
It seems to be popular to be installed on CachyOS, which in turn is the 2nd most popular distro to use Steam (after SteamOS itself), so my guess is that it's a popular setup for gaming...
[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/waydroid/files/images/syste...
waydroid_x86_64 181015
waydroid_arm64 8718
waydroid_tv_x86_64 3200
waydroid_x86 1215
waydroid_arm64_only 914
waydroid_car_arm64_only 69
---
usa_total 337390While part of it was that I was no longer interested in tinkering with ROM and playing cat-and-mouse game with SafetyNet/root detection/whatever, the other part is that I cannot trust these ROMs, some of which come (or came) with their own bloatware. Those that have official builds are of course better, but the overall experience and security situation is still much worse than OEM ROM, despite all the junk there.
P.S. another issue is that I became sick of is devs using xda forum as the only communication channel, including bug reports, updates etc. GitHub has existed for over a decade, and the issue tracker/release system is usable, yet they choose the worst way to do software engineering.
The GrapheneOS setup seems a lot better (though it has more limited support).
More projects should strive to establish a culture like GrapheneOS has.