I’m in search of the perfect ROM for my phone. A ROM not for hackers, but also not for people who don’t know what a ROM is. A ROM that doesn’t expand on the stock ROM besides adding what should have been there anyway, like root and tethering. Users like me don’t need third party multi-touch modules, support for extra filesystems, or ipv6 before the stock ROM has those features. But we do prefer to own our phones with root, instead of “borrowing” phones from the manufacturer. (If you don’t have root, you don’t really own the device.)

Most of the ROMs on xda-developers are one-off builds from hackers who are experimenting. I don’t want to experiment — I’m looking for less Slackware, more Ubuntu on my phone. Over a year ago, I installed CyanogenMod, as it seemed like the most consumer-friendly ROM out there. For one, instead of a poorly formatted posting on xda-developers, it has an actual website. It also boasts an automatic updater, lots of nice features like tethering and a caller blacklist, and even a stable-v-unstable build schedule.

Unfortunately, CyanogenMod has become increasingly unstable for me. That’s probably due to a combination of things, including Cyanogen’s unfortunate proclivity to bloat-up the stock firmware with features and experimental kernel improvements. Another cause for the problem is likely attributable to Google’s position of only half open sourcing Android.

What I’m looking for is something like the stock ROM, with root, tethering, auto-update, and not much else. I don’t think it’s out there. Maybe I should figure out how hard it is to do it myself.