My experience with liquid

[ossrabbit]

Let me start by saying that I am heavily involved with open source software and understand the difficulties that follow from voluntarily participating in such an endeavor, especially with a small development team. Since OSS devs never get enough appreciation from the community (although this one seems to be particularly friendly), my first order of business is to thank those responsible for finding time to work on this project. So thank you!

Having said that, my overall assessment of Liquid is unfortunately not radiantly positive. To put it simply, the software is incredibly unstable. The development cycle is quick, and the feature releases plentiful, but when commonly used applications consistently don't work in different ways, it's difficult not to focus on the bad.

To list a few of what I consider to be "showstopper" bugs I have been encountering (currently on 3.1):
- Incoming phone calls regularly go to speakerphone (this has been happening since 2.x)
- Home screen regularly loads black requiring switching to another screen and back to load the icons (this has been happening since 2.x)
- Google maps frequently crashes, particularly when searching for something by name (this has been happening since I started using Liquid)
- Music app crashes and/or resets song to beginning, particularly when switching to another app while music playing (new in 3.1)
- Market crashes in spectacular ways at random (new in 3.1)
- many other more minor issues

My request is that some level of functional QA be introduced into the development cycle and focus shifted toward stability as opposed to features. As much as I like the bunch of lock-screen options, I would much rather be able to consistently answer phone calls and use Google maps. The fact that this topic exists and was posted 8 hours after the release announcement suggests that something is very wrong.

[021adam]

Let me start by saying that I am heavily involved with open source software and understand the difficulties that follow from voluntarily participating in such an endeavor, especially with a small development team. Since OSS devs never get enough appreciation from the community (although this one seems to be particularly friendly), my first order of business is to thank those responsible for finding time to work on this project. So thank you!

Having said that, my overall assessment of Liquid is unfortunately not radiantly positive. To put it simply, the software is incredibly unstable. The development cycle is quick, and the feature releases plentiful, but when commonly used applications consistently don't work in different ways, it's difficult not to focus on the bad.

To list a few of what I consider to be "showstopper" bugs I have been encountering (currently on 3.1):
- Incoming phone calls regularly go to speakerphone (this has been happening since 2.x)
- Home screen regularly loads black requiring switching to another screen and back to load the icons (this has been happening since 2.x)
- Google maps frequently crashes, particularly when searching for something by name (this has been happening since I started using Liquid)
- Music app crashes and/or resets song to beginning, particularly when switching to another app while music playing (new in 3.1)
- Market crashes in spectacular ways at random (new in 3.1)
- many other more minor issues

My request is that some level of functional QA be introduced into the development cycle and focus shifted toward stability as opposed to features. As much as I like the bunch of lock-screen options, I would much rather be able to consistently answer phone calls and use Google maps. The fact that this topic exists and was posted 8 hours after the release announcement suggests that something is very wrong.

I agree somewhat. All in all, I think Liquid is decent, but it does have many flaws, which is why I haven't used in in a while. I frequently had random issues such as "insufficient space" and reboots. Right now I'm on CushZero 2.1.1, which is Liquid based and it's been awesome.

[SaxaDroid]

I'm a tester for liquid and I have a D1 and I do not have these problems.... some things I change to get my D1 running liquid smooth is change my overclocking from 250-1000 to 550-1000 and I use Interactive for my .gov. Also I use Chevys medium voltage which I think liquid switched to on 3.2. I also lower my dalvik heapsize to 36 and I also change my minfree values. In addition to the propmodder values that I alter slightly.

Raising your min freq might help most.

Good luck

[kac8866]

I am currently using Liquid 3.2 and previously used 3.1 without any of the problems you mention. The only issue I found was with the Music app, but that was easily fixed.

I would be interested in what ROM you are currently running.

Sent from my DROID using DroidForums

[RobClay18838]

I have no problems at all with the new 3.2. I did raise my minimum cpu setting to 550 because of the incoming call bug, but other than that this rom has been the best ive used.

[BrUhNiGGs]

The phone going to speaker issue can be fixed by changed the min to something over 250MHz such as 400 or 550. The black homescreen issue is just a LauncherPro issue and not the rom. Using GoLauncher EX and i dont have that problem. And try running fix permissions to prevent some force closes.

[dpaine88]

I'm a tester for liquid and I have a D1 and I do not have these problems.... some things I change to get my D1 running liquid smooth is change my overclocking from 250-1000 to 550-1000 and I use Interactive for my .gov. Also I use Chevys medium voltage which I think liquid switched to on 3.2. I also lower my dalvik heapsize to 36 and I also change my minfree values. In addition to the propmodder values that I alter slightly.

Raising your min freq might help most.

Good luck

Could you elaborate on your prop modder changes? and the minfree values?

Also, did you change the VM heapsize for any certain reason? Is the 56 the same for all Liquid ROMs regardless of device and that is why it needs to be lowered for droid?

[BrUhNiGGs]

40m is reccomended by Zep for OG Droids.

[3278]

To list a few of what I consider to be "showstopper" bugs I have been encountering (currently on 3.1):
- Incoming phone calls regularly go to speakerphone (this has been happening since 2.x)
- Home screen regularly loads black requiring switching to another screen and back to load the icons (this has been happening since 2.x)
- Google maps frequently crashes, particularly when searching for something by name (this has been happening since I started using Liquid)
- Music app crashes and/or resets song to beginning, particularly when switching to another app while music playing (new in 3.1)

For what it's worth, I have all these problems, as well. A few notes on my experiences:
• Setting my minimum clock frequency doesn't seem to stop the incoming call bug for me.
• The Google Maps crash while searching seems to be somewhat more frequent for me when I'm playing music over Bluetooth.
• Mine also locks up when using the camera, usually after the first shot or two. This seems to get worse the longer I have the ROM installed.

I've been using Liquid ROMs almost exclusively since 1.71 or so: it's not like these bugs are stopping me from using the ROMs! But when I need a reliable ROM for some reason - a weekend where I'm going to want to use my phone more than once or twice without rebooting, or a day I expect to receive a lot of work calls - I have to put either Liquid Froyo 1.9 on my Droid, or Cyanogen. That's less-than-ideal.

These problems seem to be very device-dependent, and particularly with a small development team, that makes it hard to replicate and thus fix these bugs. In general, Liquid's ROMs are the best I've found by far - the fastest, most feature-rich, most usable, best-looking - so I'm willing to deal with the challenges that come with it, but yeah, there's no doubt I'd love it if I didn't have to flash a new ROM every time I wanted a working phone.

[BrUhNiGGs]

i had to flash back to SS 5.5 which is by far the most stable rom i can use for my OG.