Interest check: LineageOS 13.0 nightlies for Mi 4c

[terence.tan]

Hi all,

Over the past few months I have been building CyanogenMod (now LineageOS) 13.0 for my personal use. It's based off Kumajaya's sources and was roughly parallel to emfox's builds. I'm doing this because I'm dissatisfied with the stability and reliability of existing ROMs. (I can't claim that mine is any better, however it does put me in a position to debug the issues.)

This is an interest check. I am considering publishing my nightlies for people to download. I know that everyone will give a blanket "yes" to the question "should I publish my nightlies for people to download?". So instead I would like to ask:

Given the other excellent Mi 4c ROMs, including @Hikari no Tenshi's LineageOS 14.1 builds, Resurrection Remix N and Team Superluminal CM13.0, what reason would people have to use Yet Another ROM?

(Long time reader, first time poster!)

 

[philipnzw]

This will sound kind of cliche but , the more options , the better . Maybe some of us will find your ROM more suited to their daily use or something .
So yeah definitely share it man

 

[danbrown162]

This will sound kind of cliche but , the more options , the better . Maybe some of us will find your ROM more suited to their daily use or something .
So yeah definitely share it man

I second this! More roms/more activity keeps this device alive longer too

 

[IcyGlacial]

1. Your development wil keep this device alive longer.
2.(maybe) attract other dev/team to build rom for this device.
3.it will make your rom better,by sharing and let many people using it, will helps you find problem faster and improve it.
so yes!

 

[BlackXhorneT]

Always useful to have more I have an Aqua (mi4s) and the rom scene is very poor :/ a few Libra roms do support it but in recent months even the SD card support has gone making for quite a sad outlook for the device. If there were someone building nightlies, it would be ace as from time to time you might be able to dip into the aqua stuff too and we'd all appreciate that

Whatever you decide, it's a nice thing to even consider doing for the community. You have my thanks

 

[PeterMarkoff]

honestly i think Marshmallow is waste of time, most of the people are interested only in newest Android and i don't see much interest since we have official nougat ROMs from Mokee, AICP and Resurrection remix

if you want to do something different there is Nougat AOSP ROM missing, blobs from Xiaomi are already available, Nexus 5X as well, so...

 

[fathyle]

more roms, more options. i want my mi4c looks better than Nexus 5X

 

[Phlogistol]

Given the other excellent Mi 4c ROMs, including @Hikari no Tenshi's LineageOS 14.1 builds, Resurrection Remix N and Team Superluminal CM13.0, what reason would people have to use Yet Another ROM?

It really depends on what you would have to offer. The available CM13 (or are we calling them LO13 now?) ROMs are TeamSuperluminal's and Emfox's builds which are really not actively maintained anymore, although they are pretty damn stable. Except of course the few bugs that seem to go unfixed -- the touchscreen bug, which appears to be really complicated to fix without newer Xiaomi's kernel sources, the 2% battery bug which is present in TeamSuperluminal's builds and isn't a gamebreaker, and the way the SoC uses its cores in most of the ROMs based on Kumajaya's kernel sources (always active big cores) which results in lower battery life.

If you solved some of these problems, expect users to flock to your ROM. If not, I wouldn't bother, since you'll just be flooded with requests for fixing stuff that isn't broken in the first place. In fact, expect the second even if you deliver on the first.

I don't maintain any ROMs so I'm not one to give advice, but it seems to me it's a lot of work, and that you're paid with criticism and demands for more of your time. Get in contact with a ROM author and ask them for advice on this

 

[terence.tan]

Thanks for the thoughts.

As far as I can figure, there are 3 things people want:

1. Features/being on the cutting edge
2. Performance
3. Stability/reliability

We want all 3 but unfortunately it is a trade-off. In particular it takes special effort to achieve stability when combined with the other 2.

The CM14.1 builds satisfy the people who want to live on the cutting edge. The Xceed ROM is built for speed for those who think that Snapdragon 808 should perform like the top-tier chipset that it is

But out of all the ROMs I've tried (haven't tried the CM14.1 builds yet but have tried most of the others) I've had the following stability problems:

• Screen freezes, requiring reboot
• Sleeps of death
• Random reboots in the middle of the night (waking up at 3 a.m. to find my phone clicking at me on the "decrypt your device" screen)
• Stuttering or hangups
• OpenGL-based games crashing

And that's not including the well-publicised touchscreen and battery problems.

So my personal strategy is:

• Marshmallow build. Sorry for those who want Nougat, but I don't consider it stable enough (yet). Plus, all the proprietary MIUI vendor blobs from Xiaomi are targeted at Android L, and getting them working on Android M is hard enough already...
• For the kernel, track CAF closely. Probably take their Android N release on the assumption that it's stable
• Use as few proprietary blobs as possible; build from CAF source where available. This is what most developers are doing already
• Use the most recent proprietary MIUI vendor blobs from Xiaomi, on the assumption that they've been buillding this version of MIUI on Android L for such a long time that it's stable
• Avoid importing proprietary blobs from other devices (Nexus 5X, Moto X Pure etc.) where possible for licensing reasons. I don't intend to try and make this an offical LineageOS build, but this might be important for whoever attempts in future...

All this is difficult and @ketut.kumajaya and friends put in some impressive hacks to get it to work in the first place. I can't promise that I can build on this! But if I ever get to a stage where it's fit for consumption, I'll publish something...

 

[aldiandrew]

in my opinion this will be great for development on Libra devices, i think Nougat rom with clean source will be great for user like me sir. For now iam using RR Nougat and for me its stable for daily use, if we can make Libra official for Lineage it can open other rom change to get official build too. Best luck for you sir and cant wait for your contribution