[Nexus 5 Android Development] LiquidSolstice:
So, this won't be a bug report or anything like that, but here's a quick rundown of what I think of this ROM and whether or not you should use it right now.

To start with, aesthetics; let's be honest, MIUI has always been gorgeous and this most certainly continues the trend. The animations, the sounds, the blurring effects, the rounded corners, the really pleasant button textures, all of it comes together to make a really, really damn good looking skin. In this build, everything is totally fluid and natural and I have no complaints about it. It's just really, really nice to move around in this ROM.

Functionality is a bit more bleak; stuff works. Mostly. The critical stuff seems to be fine, but there are a few weird ends here and there (like the Video player dying). Don't get me wrong, for a first public release, it is ridiculously stable.

And this is the part where I have to unfortunately throw some pretty heavy criticism at MIUI; the polish and finesse. If you are from any Western or English speaking country, MIUI will be an utter pain for you to move around. It feels like almost every single app that you touch has some hard-coded Chinese-based sync/cloud/other service built in to it, and although you can skip most of it, it's always there. For instance, it's really irritating for there to be a proprietary cloud storage tab in the File Manager that you can't get rid of. Also it constantly pushes you to make a Xiaomi account, during the main setup, when you open the ringtone chooser, when you want to browse your music, when you want to open up your messaging app, and so on and so forth.

Make no mistake about it, MIUI is a Chinese ROM built for a country that does not in any shape or form rely on Google Services. This is basically the same as what Amazon does with the Kindle Fire OS; it's technically Android and can technically be used with Google, but it'll never feel like it was meant to use Google. Additionally, and infuriatingly, there is a hard-coded Menu button that you simply can't get rid of, period.

Then we get to the language barrier, something that MIUI has consistently been notorious about. There are some phrases in some of the menus that are ridiculously badly translated, and there's a ton of the OS that they simply just did not bother to translate at all. The theme engine for instance is almost entirely in Chinese, leaving you to guess what's what. The T9 dialer permanently and irreversibly uses Pinyin T9 lookup meaning every time you start dialing out your numbers, you'll be searching through an entire database of Chinese numbers. Other issues include things like the Music app not being fully translated, and off-balance text-to-button ratios (owing to the fact the buttons were designed for Chinese and not latin based language text), and so on.

Basically, MIUI in its current state is literally death by a thousand paper cuts. It's smooth, gorgeous, and extremely well thought-out, but the amateur-hour translations paired with the ridiculously intrusive service prompts make it currently not worth using full-time if you're used to the quality of current AOSP-based Google Android ROMs.

Just my two cents, keeping in mind that I've had a soft-spot for Android since Miui V3. Please don't take any mortal offense to it.