[LeEco Le 2 ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, & Other Deve] twistyplain:
I previously had a terrible experience with lineage 15 (by the same developer) for our beloved le 2 and swore off custom roms as long as they were for Android versions above marshmallow. The worst thing with that rom was the completely unusable camera. I went back to stock barely two days later and that's me holding out. (My phone is a daily driver)

Yesterday I installed this pixel experience ROM and have put it through its paces today (Sunday is the only day I get to experiment with ROMS and such). After using the rom for many hours, my final decision is to go back to stock EUI... Again!!ðŸ˜ª

Why? You ask?

Well, the main reason that encompasses all others is stability. Stability in the sense that this rom has annoying stuttering all over the UI that comes on unprovoked. I have also had a fair share of unresponsive apps, even stock apps like the settings app. Another stability problem I cannot overlook is the complete loss of mobile signal on sim 2 (Even as I type this). It comes on for some minutes after I change network modes to try to coax it into getting a signal and then goes dead barely 5 minutes later.

I made some long calls and I can report that call quality is okay but also not consistent. For a few seconds at a time during long calls, the call quality reduces and gets significant hissing and static like the phone is struggling to maintain good reception. This doesn't happen on EUI. Also, the earpiece is quite loud even on the lowest setting. The highest volume is also too loud to hold the phone to your ear but that's not a downside because you can always reduce it. I just didn't like how loud it was at lowest setting particularly at night when small sound has big effect.

Talking about sound, I must mention music playback. I know that the developer had to use a lot of compatibility settings all over the place but there's nowhere where that is more apparent than audio playback. The audio quality is truly very poor and I'm not hating at all. I could make do with normal audio quality because Qualcomm SOC's usually have above average audio performance but that's nowhere to be seen on this ROM. The sound during music playback is hissy and crackling and you can clearly tell that the audio is playing using a fallback (when all else fails) decoder. I am very big on music listening on my phone so the poor audio quality is another deal breaker. I have Poweramp on all my phones so you have an idea how much I value high quality sound. I tried Poweramp on this Pixel experience ROM and the sound quality is simply not good. Every Poweramp setting defaults to compatibility mode and the sound is dismal at best. I cannot live with such poor sound from a great player like Poweramp.

NOTE: Poweramp supports high quality audio output on EUI and eui-based roms. On smallEUI, it works perfectly with 24-bit, 192kHz output which sounds heavenly... No such luck with pixel experience unfortunately.

I cannot end this review without addressing the elephant in the room -- THE CAMERA.

It's no wonder why this ROM is called pixel experience. Emphasis on EXPERIENCE. This ROM is a great way to try out the features of Android Pie with relatively good stability. However, a whole lot of things will go wrong with it eventually if you use them for long enough. I am glad the crashing in the camera app has been fixed thanks to some build.prop tweaks mentioned somewhere around page 62 of this thread. However, not crashing doesn't mean that you'll get good photos. The camera performance, no matter which third party camera you use, is a far cry from the performance on stock EUI ROM cameras and others in EUI.

The camera on pixel experience is so slow that you're guaranteed to take a terrible photo unless you put it on a tripod to photograph a stationary object. Things go wrong quickly and inevitably when any kind of motion is introduced. If you or the subject moves even a little bit, you can say goodbye to that photo because you'll get no focus. The flash timing is also slightly off but too noticeable to ignore. Actually, the camera doesn't produce a flash like in EUI. Recall that in the EUI camera, the flashlight comes on to acquire focus and then the LEDs turn on full brightness for a fraction of a second as the camera captures the image in perfect focus every time. In Pixel experience, the "flash" is more like the dull flashlight you get when using the torch. It doesn't turn on maximum brightness and makes it difficult to take a shot with the flash. The illumination on the subject is way too low. This is compounded by the fact that the camera is annoyingly slow. Bottom line is that the camera is still unusable. Doesn't matter if it's the stock camera or third party cameras like footej, snap, open camera, etc.

Pie was released in August and as good as being an early adopter is, there are major drawbacks to it. Mainly, a good number of my favorite apps have not been updated to work on Pie. I frequently see apps throwing me API incompatibility errors and others downright don't start.

Performance:

Finally I went over to synthetic benchmarking and fired up Antutu v7.1.1 and the overall score is way lower than the average for our device. According to Antutu, average score of the le 2 is 99,802 points but in my test it only managed to get 67,667 points! What's going on with these custom ROMS? At this performance level I won't bother installing high-end 3D games like PUBG or pokeymon Go because we know how that'll go.

This marks the end of my day with this ROM and finally, the end of my journey trying out anything other than stock-based roms. I won't be trying out any flavor of custom ROMS on my le 2 again unless it is based on something made by the manufacturer.

PS. I know the developer has put a lot of work into this ROM and I appreciate him for it. It's too bad the ROM hasn't reached daily driver state especially because of the camera issue.