It’s not a standard kernel, it is a vendor kernel. It has sooooo many patches it becomes close to impossible to update then by rebasing. That’s where the mainlining efforts come in: Upstream first.
It’s always easier to maintain something upstream than to try to maintain a downstream fork.
I’d also argue that the mainline kernel tends to have better security, as the drivers have far more eyes on them than the vendor driver kernels.
They use a standard Linux kernel with Android drivers trough libhybris. The proprietary UI and middleware is a mistake, I agree with that
It’s not a standard kernel, it is a vendor kernel. It has sooooo many patches it becomes close to impossible to update then by rebasing. That’s where the mainlining efforts come in: Upstream first.
It’s always easier to maintain something upstream than to try to maintain a downstream fork.
I’d also argue that the mainline kernel tends to have better security, as the drivers have far more eyes on them than the vendor driver kernels.