[GUIDE][FAQ] A guide to kernels, roms and everything - G2 General

This is a followup to this thread
3.0 ROMS
Now that you have ROOT and a CUSTOM recovery, you might want to install a new ROM. And there are truly a lot of ROMs to choose from, so which should you pick? While there is no definite guide to what's best, this will give a brief explanation of what you can expect from the various ROMS.
An important thing to note, is that your battery life won't magically improve 50% by flashing a custom rom. While it might improve you should compare it to what you have now, and not the results other people may get.
3.1 Stock Based ROMs
These ROMS are based on the stock User Interface (UI) that came with your phone. Many of these ROMs do not have useless apps pre-installed and might have a feature or two added to them, like the split window.
These ROMs usually have very good stability, are fast and have good battery life. Search around in the G2 Android Development section and follow the instructions.
3.2 Flex Based ROMs
Flex based ROMs are quite similar to stock based ROMs - except the User Interface is black. They are stable, fast and have good battery life. All of the flex based ROMs include split window and the ability to hide the navigation bar in certain apps.
3.3 G2 PRO based ROMs
These ROMS are less common and very similar to the G2 stock roms in terms of looks, stability and performance. The most unique feature of these kind of roms is that it allows you to get a "mini-view" by sliding over the navigation bar. These ROMs also include split window and the ability to hide the navigation bar in certain apps.
3.4 G3 Based ROMs
These ROMs are often the most-sought-for ROMs as they have a nice, modern Flat UI and tinted status bar that changes in accordance with the color of the action bar of the application. Many find it the most visually pleasing ROM, but it's also a bit more demanding in terms of hardware resources. They commonly have good stability, good performance and battery life on par with stock, maybe a little less.
4.0 AOSP ROMs
AOSP ROMs are for the Feinschmeckers of Android and do like the AOSP look. AOSP ROMs are commonly less rich in features, but offer an unmatched smoothness and speed. Unfortunately, since the LG Camera sources are closed source, the Camera performance on AOSP is subpar to the that on stock LG ROMS.
Please note that STOCK Kernels only WORK with G2 and G3 based ROMS and do NOT work with AOSP roms
AOSP kernels DO NOT WORK WITH STOCK LG ROMS

Related

Which ROM for which purpose?

Which roms (or rom families, really) are best for which purposes? I know some are designed to be fast and lightweight, while others go for the richest user experience, or other specialized purpose/situation.
My question is how can I find out the aim of the various roms?
The rom threads focus mostly on features provided and what rom family (if any) they based it on. Since I have no idea the aim of the original rom family (aokp, cm, miui, etc.) it's hard to decide which one is right for me.
Which player do you have?
dstarfire said:
Which roms (or rom families, really) are best for which purposes? I know some are designed to be fast and lightweight, while others go for the richest user experience, or other specialized purpose/situation.
My question is how can I find out the aim of the various roms?
The rom threads focus mostly on features provided and what rom family (if any) they based it on. Since I have no idea the aim of the original rom family (aokp, cm, miui, etc.) it's hard to decide which one is right for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Stock ROMs, which most of the customs ROMs out there are based on, are probably the most stable but the performance won't be as good.
CM7 and CM9 are slim and super fast, while MIUI, which is Cyanogen-based, has a bit more eye candy at the cost of performance. AOKP is very similar to CM9, except as far as I know the team has added many tweaks and features to make the experience more pleasant. Both are good choices if you're looking for ICS.
Hope this clears up some of the questions you may have
Thanks, Klin. That's exactly the sort of info I'm looking for.
and I'm running the USA 5.0, fgcu. It was either this or an ipad, and avoiding itunes was worth the extra $20 (ipods were on sale that week).
If you are looking to install a rom, I recommend what I have listed down below. The dev of the rom is currently updating it to 2.3.6 and I can't wait for it. It will deffinitely fix the wifi drop bug and a slightly better Gingerbread version. You do need to install a custom rom though and the one below is also a good one too.
Sent from my GenericGinger ROM + Entropy512 Kernal Samsung Galaxy Player 5 U.S. using xda app-developers app
This was my rom of choice back when I was running GB. In my opinion it is the most stable rom available for the Player 5.0. This rom is pretty fast and light as it is based on a stock GB rom.
I would also recommend this rom as it is also very stable.
For general use I would say use GB as everything works, but you can also get ICS roms if you want but all of the ICS roms in the development section have pretty major issues e.g. the camera does not work. Take a look in the development section and read the user comments/reviews/bug reports

Benefits of installing CM/AOSP

Hello,
I found similar thread, but last post was almost 2 years ago.
So, I am asking what are actual benefits of installing CM or AOSP rom compared to stock one?
The next thing, are there some major bugs in non-stock roms?
I am not asking which of rom is best or better than another, I just want to know about comparison and benefits.
Stock has the better side for battery but aosp/cm/aokp has no lag.
Go for a stock custom ROM like alliance ROM ect ect..
They have the look of aokp/cm but keep the great battery life.
you can do a lot of customization on AOSP rom......
plus there is some nice new feature you can try out.....
CM is ok for daily use.....

[Q] Stock Touchwiz vs Rom (CM, MIUI)

I was wondering about the pros and cons of each. For example, right now I'm running MIUI, and it has the best experience of any rom I've used (I've been using MIUI since GB on my N1 - only recently upgraded to the GSIII). But, I really like the way Milk Music looks, and I can only get that particular app if I'm running a near-stock touchwiz based rom.
I was wondering if there was a way to get the best of both worlds? Or if I should stay away from stock entirely, or if there are any other benefits I'm missing!
Hello !
I believe this is one of the hardest question to reply ever "stock or aosp/aokp/miui".
For me, everything depends on what you want to do with your phone. Exellent battery life would be stock rom, but more smoothness would be cm, for exemple.
NewbieFTW said:
Hello !
I believe this is one of the hardest question to reply ever "stock or aosp/aokp/miui".
For me, everything depends on what you want to do with your phone. Exellent battery life would be stock rom, but more smoothness would be cm, for exemple.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's mostly about appearance and functionality for me. I'm pretty good on battery life, and have a battery backup if needed. I love how clean MIUI looks. It's always looked obsessively clean, and I love it for that. It also lets me arrange my status bar into the iOS style (I like the battery on one side, signal on the other - clock in the middle).
MIUI with Aviate as my launcher seems to work wonders, and MIUI has a lot of great features - built in data monitor, app and trash cleaners, just a lot of great things to keep the phone running smooth.
But I want the samsung support as well. I like a lot of the touchwiz stuff (minus the actual launcher), and I enjoy having my data backed up with them (MIUI backs up my data, but not all of it, really). And I am absurdly interested in the Milk Music app. But when you look at stock/near-stock touchwiz based roms that have the samsung support and the camera app, and the like, you're stuck with the stock UI as well. Which is nice, mind you - leaps and bounds better than it was in previous versions, but still leaps and bounds behind the work that MIUI has done to give it the smooth feel I've come to expect.
If only there was a way to get the Samsung Framework on MIUI, I think all my problems would be solved.
I never tried MIUI, because I don't really fancy the iOS style..
I think, the perfect rom would be a mix of CM, stock rom, and maybe MIUI too, but I believe that's impossible to make.. :/
Stock:
Pros:Usually completely stable,Full warranty,Apps is usually better designed/has more features,Can use official updates easily,More Secure(Without root of course)Usually looks better(my opinion)
Cons:
(may be a bit slow)
Inefficient
Unrooted
Bootloader may be locked
High ram usage
Custom
Pros:
Usually faster than stock
Usually pre-rooted
More efficient
Usually quicker update timeframe
Less space is used
Easier to install certain apps
Cons:
Loss of warranty
Unstable
Errors
Insecure(rooted)
Apps are more plain (less features/looks)

List of ROMs and their stability and performance

I've decided to make a small list of ROMs, as well as their performance and stability, on the i717 as many people are split due to the many ROMs that are provided by our hard-working dev team
-BlackSTAR XI: A personal favorite. One of the most stable and fast ROMs I've seen for the i717. Based on stock, but different and much faster. The only downside is that some might not like the theme provided by the ROM, but it's still pretty nice.
-CyanogenMod Official Build: A beautiful and fast AOSP ROM, but very buggy although it's on "stable". ROM deteriorates over time, HW overlays don't work, phone reboots occasionally on its own, and my SD card wasn't detected after a month of usage.
-Unoffical CM 11: A good AOSP KK ROM, but has HW overlay and stability issues.
-Padawan: A version of stock with some simple tweaks. Quite stable.
-BlackStar BlackJelly: A ROM similar to BlackSTAR XI. Still very stable but I personally prefer BlackSTAR XI.
-Candy5: Laggy, but a good venture into LL as it is still being developed. Not suitable for day-to-day use.
More ROMs will be added as I have time to test them.
HackedBotato said:
I've decided to make a small list of ROMs, as well as their performance and stability, on the i717 as many people are split due to the many ROMs that are provided by our hard-working dev team
-BlackSTAR XI: A personal favorite. One of the most stable and fast ROMs I've seen for the i717. Based on stock, but different and much faster. The only downside is that some might not like the theme provided by the ROM, but it's still pretty nice.
-CyanogenMod Official Build: A beautiful and fast AOSP ROM, but very buggy although it's on "stable". ROM deteriorates over time, HW overlays don't work, phone reboots occasionally on its own, and my SD card wasn't detected after a month of usage.
-Unoffical CM 11: A good AOSP KK ROM, but has HW overlay and stability issues.
-Padawan: A version of stock with some simple tweaks. Quite stable.
-BlackStar BlackJelly: A ROM similar to BlackSTAR XI. Still very stable but I personally prefer BlackSTAR XI.
-Candy5: Laggy, but a good venture into LL as it is still being developed. Not suitable for day-to-day use.
More ROMs will be added as I have time to test them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Be advised that you don't want to venture into the "Best Rom" realm. XDA does not allow this. Opinions and individual device results vary.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717

Custom roms in general

I have some thoughts about custom roms in general.
Wanted to know if I'm alone in this or am I missing something.
I'm an android user for a long time and like to tinker with custom roms.
Reading a lot of posts on XDA I came to a conclusion that a large amount of you prefer AOSP build roms rather then CM.
I share the same opinion.
I don't like pie controls, heavy themes, 44 toggle buttons, list view animations ect....
I like roms that are close to stock android as possible and from your posts many of you do, too.
I appreciate all the work devs are doing for the community....
but would like to see more custom roms that are AOSP based and close to stock rather then having a lot of (for me at least) unnecessary features.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Thank you in advance.
AOSP is pure android and CM is some handy features included in AOSP. I personally prefer CM over AOSP because of this. For instance, quick drawer swipe and clear all in recent buttons. So basically their is not much difference but you can choose not to use any of these features in CM . I don't use pie control. Theme usage is upto you. Though black themes save battery and sometimes makes look better when you are bored with stock look. Toggles again are quite good to use. If you don't want to use a toggle, you can remove it. But I like sync, LTE selector and IME selector toggle.
Once you use CM, it's little hard to go back to vanilla android.
s3r3tin said:
I have some thoughts about custom roms in general.
Wanted to know if I'm alone in this or am I missing something.
I'm an android user for a long time and like to tinker with custom roms.
Reading a lot of posts on XDA I came to a conclusion that a large amount of you prefer AOSP build roms rather then CM.
I share the same opinion.
I don't like pie controls, heavy themes, 44 toggle buttons, list view animations ect....
I like roms that are close to stock android as possible and from your posts many of you do, too.
I appreciate all the work devs are doing for the community....
but would like to see more custom roms that are AOSP based and close to stock rather then having a lot of (for me at least) unnecessary features.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Thank you in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Don't get me wrong... Diversity is great... But at the same time realize that we had a CM tree long before the recent CAF AOSP tree came around. I don't think you're going to find many ROMs that don't use it as a base and as far as AOSP goes, we have AOSParadox which is a CAF optimised AOSP ROM. I believe @OldDroid has something in store as well.
As for CM being bloated, I can see where an experienced user would complain. At the sane time they are useful features.
If anything, we need more kernels. Despair for instance, hasn't had any commits for at least a month
saurabh40629 said:
AOSP is pure android and CM is some handy features included in AOSP. I personally prefer CM over AOSP because of this. For instance, quick drawer swipe and clear all in recent buttons. So basically their is not much difference but you can choose not to use any of these features in CM . I don't use pie control. Theme usage is upto you. Though black themes save battery and sometimes makes look better when you are bored with stock look. Toggles again are quite good to use. If you don't want to use a toggle, you can remove it. But I like sync, LTE selector and IME selector toggle.
Once you use CM, it's little hard to go back to vanilla android.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is exactly what I was curious about. I see that your android experience as far as custom roms and features goes differs far from mine. I used to install custom roms when i bought my first android smartphone (i9100). tried out almost every rom that was available at the time... from CM to AOKP, Paranoid Android and many others. I now own Oneplus x and had just yesterday installed AOSParadox. my experience with it for now is that it is fluid and seems stable enough for daily use. the only thing I miss is tristate keys. CM13.1 in retrospect had some bugs with the flashlight and with google now(home button)... but maybe it was fixed in the meantime. sudamod, resurrection remix, mokee, aicp where exacly what I wrote about and had too many features that for me are not that useful as a user.
The main reason for writing my post was because I saw a lot of users here and on oneplus forums requesting an 6.0.1 AOSP rom.
RJDTWO said:
Don't get me wrong... Diversity is great... But at the same time realize that we had a CM tree long before the recent CAF AOSP tree came around. I don't think you're going to find many ROMs that don't use it as a base and as far as AOSP goes, we have AOSParadox which is a CAF optimised AOSP ROM. I believe @OldDroid has something in store as well.
As for CM being bloated, I can see where an experienced user would complain. At the sane time they are useful features.
If anything, we need more kernels. Despair for instance, hasn't had any commits for at least a month
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That was one of the reasons why I have decided to write my post.
I saw a lot of users here and on other forums requesting an 6.0.1 AOSP rom.
Some of them where more specific and wanted to find roms that are not CM based.
Even as far as I know when a dev is listing bugs those are bugs that come with CM base itself (mostly wifi, bluetooth, camera bugs).
I now own Oneplus X. One thing I found interesting was that when using stock oxygenos my gaming experience was that the games where lagging a bit.
When I flashed a custom rom and went to settings - battery - battery mode and set it to performance all the games run just fine.
Since you mentioned that we need more kernels... do you thing that gaming performance or performance in general could benefit from custom kernels and what features would you use (and not) in that kernel.
Thank you for your reply and for your time.
s3r3tin said:
That was one of the reasons why I have decided to write my post.
I saw a lot of users here and on other forums requesting an 6.0.1 AOSP rom.
Some of them where more specific and wanted to find roms that are not CM based.
Even as far as I know when a dev is listing bugs those are bugs that come with CM base itself (mostly wifi, bluetooth, camera bugs).
I now own Oneplus X. One thing I found interesting was that when using stock oxygenos my gaming experience was that the games where lagging a bit.
When I flashed a custom rom and went to settings - battery - battery mode and set it to performance all the games run just fine.
Since you mentioned that we need more kernels... do you thing that gaming performance or performance in general could benefit from custom kernels and what features would you use (and not) in that kernel.
Thank you for your reply and for your time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I believe that both could easily see a boost. Take Boeffla for instance. Makes the device feel an entire tier or two higher in performance then it is with just the stock kernel. As for what I'd like to see INA kernel, here's a list
1. HID Keyboard and CDROM support
2. F2FS support for cache
3. A CAF base
4. Unlocked voltage and clock speed
5. 3.10 instead of 3.4
6. CM 13 support
That's what comes to mind. Boeffla does most things for me and battery life is great but it lacks CM support. AK is pretty awesome in terms of performance enhancements, Franco was amazing back when I used it (last I checked you'd edit a file for configuration versus using an auditor), and Despair is really great
---------- Post added at 11:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:55 PM ----------
Oh and something built with the Sabermod toolchain would be pretty swell.
s3r3tin said:
I have some thoughts about custom roms in general.
Wanted to know if I'm alone in this or am I missing something.
I'm an android user for a long time and like to tinker with custom roms.
Reading a lot of posts on XDA I came to a conclusion that a large amount of you prefer AOSP build roms rather then CM.
I share the same opinion.
I don't like pie controls, heavy themes, 44 toggle buttons, list view animations ect....
I like roms that are close to stock android as possible and from your posts many of you do, too.
I appreciate all the work devs are doing for the community....
but would like to see more custom roms that are AOSP based and close to stock rather then having a lot of (for me at least) unnecessary features.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Thank you in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You see, the thing with custom roms is that you just use what's available. It is difficult to put request in the open.
For instance I like custom stock roms, which totally isn't available. But I'm not in the position to ask for this. The only thing we can do (as non developers) is to support this particular scene, if one day a dev cooks one up. Which for aosp already has been done.
So go ahead and install and try the few aosp and participate with this community, to make better aosp roms. Which eventually will result in more aosp roms.

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