I have been running lineageOS on my OnePlus 2. I liked it, but Lineage has stopped supporting my phone. There are two options that I have been able to find as replacements - postmarketOS and /e/OS. Any thoughts on those or other recommendation? Anything that gets security updates, is open source, and is functional meets my needs.
reading recommendation: https://blog.brixit.nl/do-you-really-want-linux-phones/
postmarketos is better longterm because they work heavily on upstreaming patches to for instance the linux kernel or other projects. ubuntu touch instead uses many local patches but doesn’t invest that much time into upstreaming.
if you have time i’d suggest to choose postmarketos and try to fix your problems you find. you can learn a lot by it and improve the long term support. because others have done exactly that before you, the support is already very good usually. so you don’t need to learn everything yourself, just need to look what other people had done on other devices to fix similar problems.
it may require a few hours/weekends until you understand things, but it feels good to have that much knowledge to be able to fix your problems.
EDIT: ah, sorry. i thought your device would be in community, not in testing: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_Two_(oneplus-oneplus2) - so i thought you had this device: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchilada)
so in that case: you probably would need to invest more time but it is still possible to get good support. usually you can also look at the ubuntu touch patches and see if you can work with them, altough for instance ubuntu touch uses usually a very old kernel whereas postmarketos uses a new kernel.
Good thoughts in the article about what needs to get prioritized in development. Yeah, my phone specifically isn’t quite there, but at least they’re pretty far along in the process, and this is good discussion for anyone else looking for a new OS who might have a different old phone. My ability to contribute to code is so limited that it might as well not exist. Best I can usually do is finding and reporting issues.
well, you can learn. many people in the tech scene have never formally learned to program and just tinkered around. trial and error basically.
so this is not a question of your programming skills and instead rather one of motivation and curiosity.
and also many people in the tech scene like to explain things if you show motivation and the desire to listen, read manuals and such things.
so good internet-search skills will get you very far in my experience