Coming back to
Siyah v6.0beta4 was like putting on a comfy pair of slippers!
I hadn't used
Siyah since before Christmas as it was, "work-in-progress", from the developer,
gokhanmoral. Since
gokhanmoral no longer owns an
SGSII and is busy with other projects, it meant that this could be a long wait. However, he had established the basics for this kernel and it was up-and-running.
Dorimanx then took on the mantle and started firing out
Siyah-Dorimanx kernels, based on this, at a high rate of knots. In the main, these kernels added the, "fripperies", and flourishes to
gokhanmoral's original, core, kernel.
STweaks went from a scant half-a-dozen screens to about a dozen or more with all
Dorimanx's add-on's and tweaks... half of which, I must confess, that I either do not understand fully or use.
IMHO,
Dorimanx has fallen into the trap that
gokhanmoral got himself into with the
Gingerbread, Siyah, 2.6.2, kernel. That is, he has tried to please everyone and add in everything that posters requested.
For
gokhanmoral this had the effect of turning the
Siyah 2.6.2 kernel in to a behemoth that took on a life of its own and required 3 or 4 external app's to make it work and a multitude of settings for those app's. So much so, that I had to publish a
Dummies Guide to try and make sense of this one kernel and help posters with their settings. It meant that one had to almost configure one's phone around the kernel and its app's rather than the other way round.
It was at this point that
gokhanmoral had an epiphany and realised that, "less-was-more", and his future releases did not rely so heavily on a multitude of settings and app's and he turned instead to ensuring that he got the basics right and that it ran on the most ROM's with the least problems.
This brings me to the latest
Dorimanx releases of the
Siyah, base, kernel. There are loads of features in the
STweaks for
Dorimanx 7.43,
7.44,
7.45,
7.46 and
7.47 that posters have requested and demanded and it has, like the
Siyah 2.6.2, taken on a life of its own and, IMHO, become another behemoth.
For someone new to the kernel it offers a bewildering array of settings which all interact with one another and offer specific features. I, for one, admit that I do not fully understand all of them and therefore take the easy way out... I go straight to Profiles in
STweaks and select extreme_battery profile and then, because I use it, BLN, (
Back Light Notification), as I find this very useful as for about a two thirds of the day my phone is on Silent.
It also means that each of these new features has to be made to work and interact with the kernel and allows more margin for error and can cause problems for the user.
The last
Dorimanx kernel that I felt happy with was
v7.43. Since then I have experienced problems with the various subsequent releases. Whether it be lagging, poor battery life, inability to switch kernels, wakelocks or, in the case of
v7.47, the inability to boot at all on the
JB LSD.
Please, do not get me wrong, I really do appreciate all of
Dorimanx's time and effort that he invests in trying to bring us a kernel par excellence and I do not doubt his abilities but I do think he may have lost sight of the, "
K.I.S.S.", principle and, as
gokhanmoral discovered, sometimes less is more.
As can be seen from the forum here, posters are drifting away from the latest
Dorimanx release and trying the, essentially, stock
PhilZ and
Jeboo kernels or the fairly basic but efficient,
Speedmod. Some, like me, are re-discovering
Siyah, albeit a beta version, but one that offers a few pages of
STweaks that the user can configure to their usage fairly quickly. OK... so it does not have pre-configured Profiles but If I want battery savings I go for Conservative+noop or, for Performance, I choose Ondemand+sio. It also does not have Backup and Restore but I have found that I could not, or dare not, use these between the various Dorimanx releases as they caused problems and I therefore used
GS2KernelWipe for each new iteration.
The
proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating... and for me, this has manifested itself in the last 24 hours on
Siyah 6.0b4 with 25% battery left.
I cannot stress enough, that this is in no way intended as a, "go", at
Dorimanx who works very hard on our behalf and is someone that I have happily donated to by way of thanks and recognition for his talent, support and hard work. Rather, it is an attempt to explain some of the myriad of problems and choices facing him.
I will, of course, be up for the next
Dorimanx release!
I`ll stick to jeboo 1.3 for a while then...
