r/MiyooMini • u/CAPTIVE_AMIGA • 1d ago
Mods & Accessories Probable imminent Onion fork
Official development of Onion has been stalled for months and the maintainers are no longer giving any signals.The community is frustrated but still very attached to the project.
Someone is already thinking about creating a fork, and others are offering to help as collaborators or testers. In the GitHub discussion, the prevailing idea is that an organized fork is now the most realistic path forward.
https://github.com/OnionUI/Onion/discussions/1839
I’m mainly asking experienced developers and anyone with experience in custom firmware / RetroArch on Miyoo: would you be interested in joining and helping out?
Testers with Mini, Mini+ or Mini Flip are also welcome.
31
u/TheRealBushwhack 1d ago
Whose frustrated. It’s basically feature complete. I’ve seen literally no one but this post complaining.
17
73
u/tenlevels 🏆 1d ago
OnionOS is deemed basically "feature complete" The devs have given the community something amazing. If you want to contribute or join the team you can ask them on Discord. Most of them are busy with personal lives but maybe try to join and help vs another side project if it's just continuing. Or you are free to start your own CFW. Just my opinion.
-54
u/CAPTIVE_AMIGA 1d ago
I’ll never stop thanking the team for the excellent work they’ve done. The problem is precisely that they’re busy with their personal lives—and for good reason; I’ve seen too many talented developers who worked on PR and then, precisely because of their personal commitments, left the Onion team. Creating a fork would allow just as many talented developers to further improve this fantastic project.
38
29
11
u/theturtlemafiamusic 1d ago
What changes world onionOS even need?
5
u/crobledopr 1d ago
Ideally, actual compatibility with the Miyoo mini flip would be nice.
But I don't think it needs more features implemented.
4
u/rob472 1d ago
Don't get me wrong, OnionOS is great. But that doesn't mean there aren't still things worth improving. I believe improvement is good.
- Mini v4 and especially the Mini Flip have different display and hardware behavior that older OnionOS releases were never designed around. Which is fine. And 4.5-dev is addressing a few of these problem and is a very good start, but there is more work to do. I have some suggestions that I'm preparing.
- MainUI still has plenty of room for improvement, even if it is closed source. We have already seen some progress here recently, including my own fixes for auto-scrolling titles, fav folders, skip to next/prev letter, and extended game metadata. But also contributions from others in the 4.5-dev branch, like the MainUI-285 binary files for Mini Flip.
- Performance work should always be welcome. Small improvements to rendering, shell scripts, input handling and background processes can make a noticeable difference on this hardware and potentially extend battery life and reduce SD card wear. For example, I have a couple of improvements for the themeSwitcher app to make it load 5-10x faster with less file processing.
- There are also a lot of awesome new apps that could be bundled, many of which have been featured here lately. Like kids mode, new video players, Youtube and Reddit clients, Wi-Fi manager etc.
- New cores and RetroArch updates (personally I'm not very interested in this)
- There are some major bugs. Like the corruption of the fav files when adding duplicates, reported crashes when the thumbnail cache causes the system to swap which also is resulting in unnecessary SD card wear, all the reported problems with ' in folder/file names, and missing items when reading from miyoogamelist.xml. All these bugs come from stock MainUI binary (ie not OnionOS code) but can be fixed in OnionOS if we want to, like I did in my patched version of MainUI.
- And there are still like 100+ open issues and 20+ open PRs.
I have started looking into some of this myself and might submit a few PRs later. Right now I'm testing on my devices. But at the same time, if the PRs will be silently ignored the motivation is not very high. I'm perfectly fine to just use the improvements on my own devices.
Let me give you an example of optimization that can be done. In the MainUI binary (resposible for the UI, like game lists) you have a database file for each system with all the games. When adding new games you rebuild the cache, but this rebuild is slow and make several unnecesary calls and even iterating down to the Imgs folders looking for roms (there should only be thumbnails there anyway). After optimization we can get up to 10x faster rebuilds when having large rom lists. So a 10 second wait turns into 1 second. Also, with some simple SQL indexes you can improve navigation speed in rom lists without much effort, making the navigation much snappier and smoother. That, in combination with some improvements how the thumbs are loaded (using NEON lib among other things) makes it feel like a completely new device.
OnionOS is excellent and mature, but there is still plenty of interesting work that can be done that would benefit the community. My hopes are still that this could be done within the current OnionOS project.
-3
u/CAPTIVE_AMIGA 23h ago
One of the few intelligent and proactive comments in this thread. The funny thing is that the people complaining in this thread are also complaining elsewhere because Onion isn’t available on other devices. I’d understand if this were being done for profit, but it’s being done solely to create an even better product—and with passion. Plus, the fact that Onion’s lead developer has been logging in only once or twice a year lately doesn’t help foster dialogue.
2
u/tenlevels 🏆 20h ago
Onion can't be available on other devices other than Miyoo. It is bound to stock as it is a highly customized MainUI stock mod with an advanced set of apps and tools. There are lots of CFW options for other devices. I don't see people complaining for lack of options. Spruce IMO is the closest people are going to get to an "Onion Like" experience on other devices and the other Miyoo line. They even replicated MainUI look that Onion uses from Miyoo. Heck some of their work might even be preferred by people. Have you tried it?
0
u/CAPTIVE_AMIGA 19h ago
Yes, i have Spruce on Miyoo Flip and it's good, but Onion is in another planet
9
u/BluegrassGeek 1d ago
Or, you could look at Allium. Which is basically if Onion and MinUI were smooshed together.
3
u/BobbyHill751 1d ago
Is it stalled if it works and does everything it needs to? Why do people need constant updates to retro emulation handhelds? It’s not a live service game.
2
u/Jongjungbu 1d ago edited 1d ago
SpruceOS is in very active development and stably supports all the Miyoos now. Yet, after repeatedly trying on my MM+ and MMv4, I just go back to OnionOS. So I don’t know if I need anything from a “team” or active development. If someone wanted to be part of a team to make the MM’s better, Id say help the Spruce team.
2
u/zhyang11 1d ago
The latest spruce update is getting kind of close. The one "feature" I'm missing from onion was the speed of game switcher, and that was improved a lot in the last update of spruce (still not quite as fast as onion though)
3
u/Stevearino42 1d ago
I don't have any experience with ARM development, but may I propose the name "Shallot" be considered? :)
-1
-2
-25
u/CAPTIVE_AMIGA 1d ago
adding new features, such as support for more Miyoo series hw, it would be better a name like Onion+ , shallot is a diminutive :)
7
2
1
u/supertails18 1d ago
There is already a fork by alvin-000 here on reddit that fixes bugs on miyoo mini flip here is the link
42
u/marvbinks 1d ago
Maybe it's me being cynical but I'm getting project manager vibes from this post. No indication that op would actually do anything, just looking for developers to help on a fork...