What is all this whining about Windows-only flashing?

If you look at https://github.com/mer-hybris/droid-...boot/flash.bat you would see that just recently (September, 26th a day before the blog announcement) a new commit for windows flashing hit the repository.

In that batch skript you would find in line https://github.com/mer-hybris/droid-...t/flash.bat#L7 a var set to Emma flashtool website.

A few lines later (https://github.com/mer-hybris/droid-.../flash.bat#L67) you will find that flash.bat will reference to Emma if your devices ASOP is < 34.3 which means you are running MM, but SFOS X requires initial Nougat (7.1.1) image. That recent image will be flashed by Emma and can be flashed by (inofficial) Linux-only tools, too.

The requirement is simply spoken to have a current Qualcom baseband and other device blobs in place to run SFOS X as a common base for all official images flashed to the device. Otherwise some might have MM (32.0.x) blobs installed leading to a faulty device with official image.

Additionally windows flashing will use fastboot.exe to flash boot, system and user partition compared to linux flash.sh which additionally flashes the cache partition with Android 6 properitary blobs which is not required by windows. This might be, because official Nougat has the right blobs by official flashing in place, but I am not sure about it.

Cheers,
Nek