The free operating system LineageOS has been released in the latest version 19 and uses the current Android 12 and its design language “Material You” as a starting point for the first time. A move to the Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) means fewer mobile devices will be supported.
LineageOS is moving to Android 12
Around half a year after the release of Android 12, the LineageOS open source community presents LineageOS 19, its free alternative to Google's mobile operating system. The free software also comes with the latest update for the security level from April.
- Kernel: Linux ( monolithic)
- Parentage:
- Linux →
- Android →
- AOSP →
- LineageOS
- AOSP →
- Android →
- Linux →
- Architectures: ARM, x86 and x86-64
- Licenses: GPL and Apache
Unlike LineageOS 17.1 and LineageOS 18.1, where the first point release appeared as a major release, the latest edition starts with version 19.0 and is now based on Android 12 and its new design language “Material You” and also includes all security updates from March 2021 until April 2022.
Chromium 100 and product maintenance
The official successor to CyanogenMod, first published in May 2009 by developer Steve Kondik alias “Cyanogen” in the XDA Developers forum, features the latest open source browser Chromium 100, including updated “WebView” controls and numerous optimizations and bug fixes mit.
With that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 12's release last October to port our features to this new version of Android.
Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google's fairly large changes in Android 11, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 12 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features, as well as adapt our additions to Android 12's new Material You design language!
LineageOS Open Source Community
The developers from the LineageOS open source community have, among other things, completely revised the volume control panel introduced with Android 12 and instead implemented a panel that can be folded out to the side.
Limited Legacy Support
Falling from the switch from iptables to the Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). However, many legacy mobile devices are out of LineageOS 19 official support. Smartphones and tablets that still use the Linux 3.18 system kernel and older are out of the running for the time being.
Bad news read ahead, sadly. I know many of you were expecting the usual myriad of legacy devices to surprise you with a 19 release, but at the moment they won't be.
This is due to AOSP's removal of iptables in favor of eBPF. This is a newer, much more efficient kernel side implementation.
The issue lies in the fact that only devices with Linux kernel 4.9 or newer have the needed capabilities to make use of eBPF. Usually, these things can be backported to older kernel versions, but at the moment, even something as close to version 4.9 as 4.4 proved challenging due to the sheer number of commits and structure changes in BPF's introduction.
LineageOS Open-Source -Community
The project has announced which devices will receive official support for LineageOS 19 in the official release notes. The open-source operating system can be downloaded from the downloads section of the official website.