I have a one plus 5 and have soft bricked (by bootloop) twice trying to get a functional eelo. Disclaimer: I am more a beginner but have decent tech knowledge and am not rushing into flashing things. And I have at least enough neurons to recover by myself from a soft brick, twice.
With full OxygenROM 9.0.9 I tried to flash via TWRP the latest eelo as per the option on “supported devices” from the eelo home page. I really liked the OS, but it had 2 issues: home button not working, and no sound. I read the eelo support here. Ok i have to update the firmware. But this seemed odd. As one plus 5 has always been compatible with project treble. As for ROM versus firmware, I get the difference but in some forums for flashing stock oxygen (like getdroidtips .com) they use the terms almost interchangeably it-s kind of confusing. Eelo says i need at least 5.1.4 firmware. Ok but my oxygen is totally up to date? And I hope 5.1.4 isn’t referring to lolipop? That’s ancient. Also the link to the 5.1.4 firmware is from 2018. Wow, shouldn’t there be more current firmware already with my stock OxygenOS? and compatible with eelo?
(Disclaimer, at this point I went back to stock oxygen and even flashed Lineage once which worked fine) Ok with stock OxygenOS, flashing from TWRP at the same time I flashed the 5.1.4 firmware, Magisk to root, and eelo. Bam soft brick. It took me a day to discover that during the boot look there was a 2 second window where i could get into fastboot and therefore back to normal (as fastboot nor recovery boot buttons were working as power up options). So back to stockROM, I assumed flashing all 3 at once was not a good idea, or rooting in the middle was the problem. So second try with Oxygen 9.0.10, TWRP flash only firmware 5.1.4 as per eelo website. BAM softbrick bootloop again. I got back to stock ROM again as said above.
Questions:
-What firmware exactly do I need for the oneplus 5. What is it’s version number, and how is it different from the firmware in current up to date OxygenOS, and how old are each of them? Am I actually flashing old firmware to be compatible with eelo?
-I have oxygen 9.0.10 shouldn’t my firmware be sufficient?
tl:dr With OxygenOS up to date on oneplus 5, flashing the firmware given on eelo install page is a sureway to softbrick your device, and if you just install eelo instead there is no sound and no home button, which is an old problem from 2018 already solved in eelo gitlab forums, which just says update to firmware, which brings me to the beginning of my tl:dr and a softbrick. I-ve done all this.
i really like the eelo OS, but man, I read a ton and tried a bunch and it doesn’t work.
Can someone lend a hand please?