[Xiaomi Mi Note 10 ROMs, Kernels, Recoveries, & Oth] makenote10greatagain:
Let me give my comment on the question how this build should continue:

(it'll take about 10 min. of reading time, but it's worth it)

- Why mod a smartphone in the first place?

- Should we continue to use LineageOS, or switch to ForkLineage?

- Should we compile the kernel from the human-readable source code, or use the manufacturer's binary blobs?

- Where could this project go in the future? Are we a part of something bigger here?

- And most of all, what does all of this mean for everyone of us, personally?

First of all, let's start with the most important question: Should we continue to use LineageOS, or switch to a fork? I would much prefer this to become an official LineageOS build that can be downloaded from the official LineageOS website, rather than a ForkLineage. Features are not everything. Most people, I think, search for an reliable smartphone that performs well in everyday duties and is constantly supplied with the latest security updates. A phone which they can use in their daily lives, stable and working - well beyond the life expectancy of the manufacturer.

LineageOS is such a project. It enables smartphones to be used far longer than usually. It's stable and has the most important features. Therefore, to enable as many people a clean and safe installation and to reach as many people as possible, making this build "official" should be the most important priority right now. A fork would not be in the interest of the Android modding community, manufacturers make modding harder every day, we should concentrate our efforts into only a handful of well-maintained projects and not split them too thinly. Manpower is short, as programmers are rare.

We've seen this effect in a lot of community software projects: With Open Office and Libre Office in the past, where legal issues lead to a split. Instead of wasting countless amounts of manpower on such things, what kind of an office suite could we have today, if they just had concentrated on making the original project better? Ubuntu Linux was once a very well-regarded entry point for everyone who had no idea what Linux was all about, but wanted to start using it - it was easy to install and use. Back in 2006, it was the most installed Linux distribution on private devices (PCs, Laptops) worldwide. Then, they added too many features and made strange decisions regarding their project, wanting to develop everything by themselves instead of relying on the community and its already existing preferred solutions. As a result, stability of the system dropped, and users left rapidly in search for better systems. What kind of a cool system could it have become, if everybody just concentrated on making the existing system better? You'd probably see much more people using Linux on desktops today if Ubuntu had just stuck to its original idea/mission of "Making Linux easy to use for everyone". We'd have much more people using Linux privately and even in companies today, since it would be more stable and reliable to work with. We'd have lots of apps for everything you'd ever want to do with a computer, actively developed by motivated people who believed into the idea of free and open source software - free to use, open to study, sharing, copying and improving explicitly encouraged instead of forbidden. Instead, with the current pandemic going on, companies and the whole education sector are relying heavily on Microsoft and Apple products, investing billions into their products in the last year alone. Linux? Still something for freaks. Another example: Navit, a once well-known free and open source navigation app, forked into many sideprojects and as a result, development of the original app slowed down. The sideprojects died and in the meantime, Navit became obsolete, since everyone started using Google Maps. We could have had a really awesome Google Maps alternative right now, if we had just sticked together and focused our efforts on one project and on making that awesome to use.

Therefore, we should concentrate on bringing this ROM to as many people as possible by sticking to the most well-known project for Android Custom ROMs: LineageOS. Make it stable to use, easy to install (official build), and spread it. More people will get to know it and use it, therefore more people will support it and help. The community grows and everyone benefits from it. Except the big corporations who want you to throw away your perfectly good phone every 2 years and buy a new one! They want Custom ROMs to stay split into a thousand small projects so they'd never gain market share.

They also want to spy on you and collect as much data about you as possible. Therefore, I also want to emphasize that our ROM should be a secure one, built from the original Android source code. We should keep the amount of binary blobs (for the non-nerds: this is software not built from code, which we therefore can't read and know nothing about what it really does) to a minimum. In this thread, the question arose whether including a pre-built kernel would improve feature-richness. While I can absolutely understand anyone who wants their favorite feature included into the ROM, our answer should still be no, if including this feature means sacrificing building our system from code ourselves (as much as possible). The kernel of your smartphone is the most sensitive software that runs on it. It has to be trustworthy. Therefore, it should be made directly from the human-readable source code. Since we already achieved that goal, we should keep it that way.

Big companies would love us to include their binary blobs, since that way, they'd regain a certain control over our projects. If we rely on their blobs too much, they can just stop releasing them at any time. Android was originally made to be as free and developer-friendly as possible. Everything should be compilable from source code - and installable as easily as possible. Only then will we ever be able to gain significant market share and convince people to join our projects (all of the custom ROMs for all of the smartphones in existance) instead of throwing away their phones every few years not only for more speed and better cameras, but because the manufacturer cancelled updates for a smartphone model! While throwing away a perfectly usable device is not only ecologically questionable, it's also financially insane, especially with prices going up steadily, especially for middle class and flagship models - while most people have less and less money to work with every year. Most of all, we sacrifice our freedoms and rights (freedom of choice, right of privacy) if we allow the majority of people to not have the ability to choose their own phone operating system, by letting our brainpower be spread across ten thousand small individual projects instead of becoming one giant force to be reckoned with, a global smartphone modding scene.

How awesome would that be: Your old phone stopped getting updates? Just go to the LineageOS website and download the ROM, you'll get the newest Android, free updates, a usable phone that doesn't spy on you and respects your privacy, and a vast community of friendly people who'll help you if you have any questions - for as long as your device lives, physically. Oh, and you absolutely don't have to be a computer nerd for that! They have a great wiki with installation instructions, too! Yes, of course you can tell your friends about it. Maybe they have a smartphone, too. Oh, and it's fun, too!

Using cool features on your phone is one thing. Making the responsible decisions to help all of the other custom ROM projects is another. Projects inspire other projects. Meanwhile, smartphone manufacturers lock their devices more strictly every day, with every new phone. Google tried to exclude us from the Android software world by restricting the use of the Play Store to stock ROMs a couple of years ago, only an outrage by the community prevented it and made them think twice. I also want to raise interest for the FDroid project, where everybody can publish their free and open source apps - it's a shame that only few people know about it and use it, it should instead be full of awesome projects so that we have a real alternative to Google. Having to use Magisk for banking apps etc. to fool your smartphones into thinking you don't have control over them (root is nothing less than that) is pure blasphemy in my opinion, having to do this shouldn't even be a thing. If we don't want to be stuck with buying pre-manufactured Samsung & Apple phones and Microsoft Windows Laptops by 2030, we should act like it.

Let's not forget who we are. Thank you for reading. You may link this in other xda threads as well. Maybe it'll start a movement and bring more people to the cause. I'd love to see a huge ass list of officially supported smartphones on the LineageOS website, with great wiki instructions on how to install them, that I can just give everybody who's interested in a free smartphone or annoyed by the amount of ads and pre-installed spycrap on their freshly bought phones!