Since the day after I received my Oneplus One new in early 2015 (which I still use daily) I used CyanogenMod and its successor LineageOS. I was happy with CM but LOS… not so much. The loss of theme capability was a harsh blow. The ban by LOS on discussion of topics including themes, rooting, and other subjects embraced by the CM community doubly so. After the mean spirited April Fools prank by LOS devs and their attitude I reached the point where I’ve had enough.
I did backups via titanium backup and twrp, wiped the necessary partitions, and installed aosp extended. I’m still working on the final touches to my migration from android 7.1 to 8.1 but it occurred to me that custom roms and their adoption and preferred roms might be a good topic.
So far I’m pretty impressed by AEX with nova prime. It lacks some features LOS had but that’s pretty much balanced by substratum support and extensions allowing a variety of customizations missing from LOS. Even so, I still miss the customization and features of CyanogenMod.
Right now my chiPhone unfortunately doesn’t have any ROMs available for it. But on other phones, I’ve always loved any ROM based on MIUI. The interface just “clicks” with what I expect from a phone, and it feels slick and lightweight with excellent theme support, which sounds like a feature you’re looking for.
With CM I used the material glass theme on xda and really liked the dark semi-transparent look. I still use MiXplorer with a theme I created that allows me that look if only for one app. I wish google would implement a theme framework like true linux distributions do. Without it even windows 3.1 was superior in the area of customization.
Yeah, Android is ridiculously difficult to theme, I imagine probably by design. Definitely try out MIUI if your phone supports it, as they basically have a theme store and you can just select it and go, no hacking needed.
I usually buy phones that have close to google roms or something that is not ugly. So over the years I’ve had nexus, motorola and post-2016 samsung, and every time I feel less the need to change roms. Anything close to AOSP + xposed will give you all you’d want, except, maybe, an easy way to theme
For years I’ve been rooting and flashing my phones with every roms available…
But recently I began tired of fixing small bugs and trying to find the best one, so I stay with the Samsung stock OS (Galaxy A3 2017).
I just rooted it, and put Xposed firmware to get some tweaks (like screen off YouTube playing for music, or battery bar for example)
Yes, LOS has an su package but discussions on their reddit of methods of doing so like supersu or magisk are forbidden and subject to deletion as is mention of xposed or themes.
I don’t know. It seems they’re becoming more and more focused on LOS being a minimalist rom. Even substratum is a taboo topic. Since forking from CyanogenMod each major release has lost features.
Is everyone using Magisk for root? It’s a neat package if you need to hide root from apps (like banking apps that detect root and stop working) plus has a module platform, that while isn’t as robust as xposed, has some neat tricks to it. I’m not sure how widespread it is outside XDA
Without knowing more, that’s… stupid IMO. If I wanted minimalist, I’d just get a Nokia 3310 and not deal with loading ROMs at all. I obviously have no say-so with the team, but I’d like to ask them - minimalist to what end? Minimalist for minimalist’s sake is pointless. But I’m not even a developer, so take my opinion as worth not a whole lot.
So what good non-stock ROMs are there? I had Cynaogen, but got Lineage about a year ago because it performed much better on my Note3.
Stock optimized (de-bloated) and rooted ROM with classic SuperSU embedding via custom recovery. No offense but whatever root complaining applications and related supporters have no place in my device and have my consent to DIAF or DIAC anytime and preferably inmediately for mankind's highest good (and let God :-D sort'em out LoL!).