and I've never bothered much with custom kernels, but aren't changes made to the source code of those all the time? It stays at a given version, sure, but I think it does still receive changes on that version.
Android vendors casually drop any kind of updates within about a year or sooner unless specified otherwise.
Fair enough, I guess this applies more to the custom ROM development scene, where timely updates are much more commonly the norm. And I think that there the kernel maintainers really did a big oof IMO. Custom ROMs are also built by volunteers, so it would just move the work from one set of volunteers to another (which are generally also less experienced, so more likely to fuck things up). Besides, aren't most drivers and such in the kernel made by actual hardware manufacturers' employees? I see contributors from e.g. chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD (but this goes for any kind of hardware) all the time. As for the volunteers that do the core kernel stuff and vetting third-party contributions and such, couldn't they just do a Canonical and put the LTS maintenance behind a paywall instead? I've always had an issue with the volunteer-driven nature of OSS development (these volunteers also need to put food on the table!), but I really don't think that what's supposed to happen now is the right way to solve this problem.
Since when do custom ROMs usually use non-OEM kernels
Why have you changed to vim?
They are modified on the regular, by various people. The kernel that LineageOS appears to be using for the OnePlus 6T can be found here. On the commit history, we can see here that Greg Kroah-Hartman has made his last commit to this repository on the 7th of January this year. To be fair, this is only the result of a very cursory look on my phone. But I think that it does show that development does continue on these kernels well past the release date of a decent phone, in this case November 2018. Maybe further back into the commit history, even commits made by OnePlus employees could be found. This device was officially supported up to Android 11, and received its last official update in January 2022.
That's running latest 4.9, to be fair. And yet that's been EOL since 2023-01, despite being a 6 year LTS release. Do you still think a bigger number of years is the solution to this problem?
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