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Comment by Dunedan | Hacker News Reader

What's really a shame is that with each new version of LineageOS a lot of devices are dropped from being supported. I have some perfectly functioning devices (including a 2014 flagship device from Samsung), which will very likely stay stuck on LineageOS 14.1.

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the new (and cheap) Xiaomi Note 5 Pro (Whyred) was dropped in October last year after about a year of support. I bought the phone specifically because it was supported. It sucks, but they depend on volunteers to keep the builds happening. There are plenty of unofficial builds now happening but nobody appears to have stepped up for official status.

The phone was originally marketed to India and gets a lot of usage there.

I still think Lineage and this hackable phone are fantastic

I bought the same phone… I think it hasn't even been supported for one year, maybe six months, maybe even less.

I'm willing to build Lineage myself for it when I find the time for it (the amount of stuff you have to download to build an Android distro is completely crazy), but I'm just wondering… why aren't unofficial builds official? Is there anything that makes it difficult, or do people just not care?

I can give you a link to download my build if you want (which is a pristine unofficial build with Android security patches till February 5, 2019), but in the end, it depends on whether you'll trust a binary build from some random person: https://mukund.org/tmp/lineage-15.1-20190214-UNOFFICIAL-whyr...

It is neither difficult nor very slow to build it from source, but it can do with a fast internet link (~fiber speeds) as the build process initially clones from several git repositories (but later syncs just fetch the changes which is very fast). Unfortunately not everyone has access to fiber.

With fiber, the clone and build ought to complete in about a day depending on your machine's performance. I recommend that you build your own (let the initial build run in the background even if it takes more than a day to finish). If you do it once and use the built OS, you'll not search again.

> With fiber, the clone and build ought to complete in about a day

That's insane btw. Great that you're ok with it, but utterly impractical for me: ADSL is maxed out at 800kbps and due to line noise generally get 80kbps. So I tether, using 4g and 0 to 1 bar of strength. During heavy cloud and rain it drops to hdpsa.

I agree with you.

Thanks as lot! But yeah, I'd rather build it myself or at the very least, get a signed binary that's somehow official.

I'm a bit reassured by your words about the build, but the hard part for me is the download as I don't have fiber at home: I've already tried once and given up after a few hours. Compiling should be okay as I've some horsepower :)

Thanks again :)

Same device here (whyred). If you want an "original" build, you can still build an up-to-date Lineage OS with the latest Android security patches from source from their repo. It is very easy to build it on Fedora or Ubuntu and it doesn't take more than a few minutes to do updated builds once you do the first complete build.

Follow the build instructions: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/whyred/build

An additional thing you may have to do (on Fedora at least) is to export LANG=C.

You'll also need a vendor tree for whyred from somewhere, like your own phone or from a public repo such as this: https://github.com/Sweeto143/vendor_xiaomi_whyred/tree/oreo

(Getting the tree from an existing Lineage OS phone per the build instructions did not work for me.) Note that the latest version of whyred vendor tree for Android Oreo is from last year. I suspect this is because Xiaomi has moved on to Android Pie for whyred.

What all this gets for you is a build with the latest Android security patches applied (February 5, 2019 as of today).

Good luck. I can report that it builds and works well and it is straightforward to build it (more so for a programmer).

thank you, this is helpful

A lot of that is proper drivers for the next version against Android's mainline. Since phone carriers and vendors often don't do the updates, the hardware is stuck, even for third parties. Sometimes a given chip might be supported if/when a similar hardware phone sees an updated Android, and someone skilled in the community can dump the drivers and port them to something like Lineage or another custom/modern rom.

14.1 is still receiving security updates though, which is more than can be said for the official ROMs from Samsung.

My Nexus 9 is no longer supported, which is a shame.

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