My daily driver is an S8 and I’m interested to install /e/ on it.
But I have questions…
I heard that /e/ OS is a fork of LineageOS, right ?
But I can’t find the S8 in the official supported devices list of LineageOS ?
Are /e/ dev working on S8 from scratch to provide “Stable” builds ?
If so, why not pushing the S8 to the official LineageOS roster ?
PS : I’m sorry for my English if I made mistakes => I’m French ^^’
Yes, /e/ is a fork of LineageOS.
There is an “unofficial” build of LineageOS for S8. You can find it on the XDA-Forum. The /e/-version is probably based on that.
Most of the officially supported /e/ devices are also officially supported by Lineage OS. For devices which are not officially supported by LOS, the /e/ ROM is usually created from an unofficial LOS build, and usually by a someone in the /e/ community who is not an /e/ employee. For example, the official /e/ build for Sony Xperia Z5 Compact (suzuran) is based on this unofficial Lineage OS ROM.
Such a build will only become an official /e/ build if someone - usually the person who built the unofficial /e/ ROM - volunteers to become the ROM Maintainer*. The same is true for some devices which do have official LOS ROMs (e.g. Xperia Z3 Compact), but which /e/ does not have sufficient staff, or access to the device in question, for testing. Both these cases are sometimes referred to as ‘Community builds’.
Lineage OS has different requirements for a build to become ‘official’, and /e/, its community ROM maintainers - and the creators of the unofficial Lineage OS ROMs on which the community builds are based - do not necessarily have the time, interest or resources to ensure that these requirements are met.
I am the maintainer of the official /e/ ROMs for the two devices mentioned above. I also create unofficial builds for other Sony Xperia devices.
* Note that the ROM Maintainers page implies that the maintainer is responsible for building the official ROMs for their device. This is no longer the case: ROM maintainers work with /e/ to ensure that the ROMs for their devices can be built successfully using /e/'s build infrastructure. Their main responsibility once that is done is to test new builds.
