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Comment by zifnab06 | Hacker News Reader

"co-founder"/one of many project leads here. AMA?

I don't have a question, just wanted to thank you for what you are doing. LineageOS is the reason why I can still use my 2013 first gen Moto G as a daily driver today. Projects like this are a giant fuck you to the companies hell bent on closing off their devices and taking as much freedom as possible away from the user.

Mine was unbearably slow even with Cyanogen installed. How is it working out for you?

I am on 7.1.2 and it works surprisingly well. Though it depends on how you use it I guess. I use mine just for messaging, GPS, reddit and listening to music. Battery is about 20% left after a day of usage. Not having Gapps on my phone probably helps. I've been planning to replace the battery soon enough from eBay.

Please write a proper "About" page for the site, because the current one is trying to be cute/minimal, but isn't helpful.

"Please see Wikipedia" under a dictionary excerpt looks like it's sending me to learn what the word means.

PR's welcome :P

Any chance you could bring back the ability to have a different encryption and lock screen password? If not, why won't you? Currently it's impossible to have a usable device with just secure passwords. Google's silence on this issue for 6 years is really sketchy, and I was shocked when I realized LineageOS removed this ability from CM as well. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36945251

This is possible with SnooperStopper: https://f-droid.org/packages/cz.eutopia.snooperstopper/

ugh that issuetracker link requires you to sign in with a google account...

I was wondering about this as well. It looks like the feature was removed in this commit [1], which was discussed a bit in this Reddit thread [2].

[1] https://review.lineageos.org/#/c/167033/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LineageOS/comments/630f9x/why_were_...

A little off topic, but there is a plan for an official recovery from lineageos?

TWRP is fine, but full device encryption is not supported on all device that are supported by lineageos, and also it dosen't seem to support OTA update from lineageos updater.

ps: Thanks for the AWESOME work!

In normal AOSP land, there is no encryption support in recovery. I know we had the same restriction in cm recovery (you couldn't mount/backup individual files from /data, for example). I sadly have no more information on a lineage recovery right now.

Which devices do you recommend buying today for the best user experience installing and using LineageOS? And which manufacturers are being most helpful to the project?

stats.lineageos.org exists. Bit basic ('big data' problems, storing ~1.7 million anonymized checkins per day in mongo...isn't the best idea).

Personally I try to stick to something with an unlocked bootloader. That was the Nexus line, now Pixels (except a/b updates are still a bit rough under lineage)

Do phones still have bad camera performance when using Lineage? I'll need to move two Nexus 5x devices when Google drops support.

Not a question but a compliment for LineageOS: thank you for this project. It has brought to life and vastly improved over the stock ROM at least 4 devices that I use. Please keep up the great work.

Thank you for LineageOS! I'm using lineageos.microg.org to avoid Google services but have the unifiednlp stuff. I understand this isn't your release, but I appreciate the work you've done behind it that I benefit from.

I have noticed a bunch of relatively minor bugs. I believe they affect LineageOS directly as well, as I've also seen some of them on an old device that was using LineageOS directly.

How should I go about reporting these bugs? Do you want the reports?

These are things like "Changing the default SMS SIM card to SIM card 2 does not survive a reboot", "Adding an all-day calendar entry for multiple days loses the last day upon save if the timezone is London (GMT) and not in daylight saving", "Messaging app deletes all messages when the phone boots believing it's 1970 because the clock isn't set yet" and "Setting the year to 2018 after the phone boots up believing its 1970 is really difficult because the year box doesn't scroll far enough".

Generally we don't accept bugs on devices that don't come off our build slaves. It's a (rather convenient) way of getting rid of all the downstream-produced bugs...

That being said I threw this in the project's slack.

Thanks. If I can reproduce on a pure LineageOS device, do you want the bug reports then? In other words, are these the types of things you would patch LineageOS for if you had the patches? I ask because I don't have much of an understanding of how this ecosystem works.

Yes please!

Take a look here for more info on how we do bug reports currently: https://wiki.lineageos.org/bugreport-howto.html

Thanks for the AMA offer!

I'm currently working to bring my old Galaxy S2 back to life, but I have the Sprint-exclusive version of the phone: the D710, not the international i9100 that everyone else has.

Are there any guides on how to port LineageOS for the i9100 over to the D710? I imagine this is a common problem for anyone who has bought carrier-specific hardware, but I'm not familiar enough with LineageOS to intuitively know how to do it.

Thanks for your work on this project!

Samsung has this nasty habit of releasing hardware under the same name, with insanely different hardware. This ranges somewhere between "The screen resolution is different" and "This S8 has an exynos chip, and this one has a qualcomm chip". As such, a bit hard to say what's required...

Non programmer here. What cool new stuff can the apps do on my phone with the new APIs?

Also, why do you think there is such dearth of custom phone OSs unlike the linux scene?

There's a list of API's here: https://lineageos.github.io/android_lineage-sdk/reference/li....

I believe this update was mostly around styles, "Change the system accent to some color based on some event" was listed in the blog post earlier, along with night mode.

FWIW I found the bug reporting schedule really off-putting.

What would it take to resolve the unlocked bootloader vector?

I've been interested in LineageOS, but not enough to carry around a phone with an unlocked bootloader.

Buy a Pixel which supports running custom images with a locked bootloader and verified boot.

This is actually a problem that bothers me. Most of the recoveries also ship with absolutely no security (see: twrp and the "I can just format your phone by booting into it"). I don't really have a good answer though - if you lock a bootloader, even with a secured recovery image, and that image breaks, you're stuck forever. Without a huge QA effort (that doesn't work for an open source project like this), I don't think there's much we could do sadly :( In actual OEM land they do a build and test it for weeks/months before releasing it, we just...build things and ship them.

Can you clarify for me? Why might the image break after I've locked it? Why can't I just unlock it again? What are the consequences of this? I'd like to run Lineage but so far I'm unclear of the unanticipated negatives.

By default, after an update, Android installs a new recovery image during the first boot of that update. We currently have this disabled. If you relock the only way to ever update your recovery image is to unlock (wiping the device & losing encryption keys), flash a new image, and relock. This would need to happen for any discovered kernel exploit (read: about once a month) to avoid having an insecure device.

If the update feature's enabled, there's a chance that after an upgrade, recovery gets updated to a version that no longer boots. We don't QA every build like you see from an actual OEM, they're provided as nightly builds (on a weekly basis). One bug and your expensive device is now a brick.

So this is like GApps, but FOSS (I assume?)? It's missing a license file I think

No, this is not at all like gapps, you're thinking of the 'microg' stuff?

Not at all. It's just a java library you can use in an android app to do additional things on devices running lineage.

Is there anything you wish that Google/AOSP contributors did differently that would make the LOS development process easier?

Are there plans to do a yearly or fixed release schedule?

Nope. Bunch of volunteers, things will be released when they're ready. Weekly builds have been working well so far though!

Thank you for LineageOS!

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