[Galaxy S II Android Development] cdzo72:
Re: [ROM][CWM][Feb 20]JB XXMS1 NeatROM Full/LITE/Mods/Themes

I too at first used AOSP/AOKP ROMS when I first got my S2 for reasons of being able to customize the look and use themes and icons and such but they WERE ALWAYS lacking and ALWAYS had issues with each release of whatever ROM I tried. THEN I switched to NEAT ROM back when I could still use Jkay for ICS ROMS...

Well when JB rolled out I missed the customizations at first but with great communities for a few ROMs (NEAT, WANAM, ALLIANCE, OMEGA) the custom zips just about allow you to make most any stock based deodexed ROM to your liking. The only thing missing was a custom kernel with BLN (Siyah and DorimanX... I personally prefer Siyah because its less congested with options and the only thing I want from it is BLN anyway and switch to pegasusq governor so I have no need for all the options Dori provides). Well now that Alliance has a flashable mod pack that works with Sale's LSD Lite ROM I find there is no longer a need for AOSP based ROMS (all that blue and black is boring to me anyway) after several months I now know what apps I can even delete from NEAT Lite (I remove 74 apps from NEAT lite and still retain full functionality except for the cheesy ALL Share apps, Samsung bloat syncing and mobile tracking) but as far as signal and phone use and messaging the Sammy ROMs are much better than any of the custom ROMs in my opinion and I like all the greens and oranges and such in my ROM and with Alliance Mods I can have my status bar and pulldown and all that even prettier and have more eye candy than I ever had with any custom ROM.

THERE IS one catch... the backing up of the preload partition with custom kernels... you have to back it up OR wipe it separately with some other scripts in recovery... BUT IF you're not interested in BLN or kernel tweaking then PhilZ is rock stable AND it backs up and wipes all partitions if you like..

YET there IS STILL a workaround for that. I use Siyah kernel 6.0b5, NEAT ROM Lite 4.3 and Alliance Mods for LSD ROMS and I install Online Nandroid app... it will backup EVERYTHING. IF I NEED to restore a recovery made with Online Nandroid I just boot into Siyah recovery, flash PhilZ latest kernel (now 4.63 with boot hang bootloopbl fixed), reboot recovery, once in PhilZ recovery I restore the nandroid made with Online Nandroid (the recovery with Siyah or DorimanX will not restore the preload partition, thus the need to flash PhilZ kernel and reboot into it) and reboot... once booted into Android I boot into recovery and flash Siyah kernel again, reset profile to default and once booted into Android again I make my BLN and governor changes and reboot once more.

That may sound like a lot of hassle but its really only about 5 minutes work tops restoring a nandroid that way... but the ROMs are so stable that there only true reason for nandroids is to save your setups and backing up before a new release or if you've made a booboo with switching off some autostart app of some kind..

Whew... long thread but I promise you its worth the effort to learn all the ins and outs of swapping over... there are a lot of names here I recognize from my Resurrection Remix days (Many40, TheRedBlur, etc... you all know who you are) and they will all probably tell you the same thing...

And no... no extra gApps to flash. Once I delete all unneeded apps and other system files my NEAT zip file is only about 325 MB compared to an AOSP ROM which may be 130 to 150 MB plus another 90 or so MB of gApps... so the Sammy ROMS are roughly 100 MB heavier but well worth it... good luck