Upgrading the Pixel 2 XL to LineageOS 18.1

The LineageOS team recently launched LineageOS 18.1 (based on Android 11) to several devices, including the 2017 Pixel 2 XL. This is awesome news to me since my old Pixel 2 XL stopped receiving official software updates last year.

Since this is a major release, I have to manually install the software via ADB rather than a traditional OTA update, so I figured I'd document the simple process. Although this is a manual update and your device should remain intact, it's best to back up your device anyways.

Make sure you have adb and fastboot installed. I confirmed this just by typing in adb --version and fastboot --version into a terminal.

1. Download the latest version of LineageOS 18.1 here: https://download.lineageos.org/taimen
2. Open up a terminal and navigate to where the image is saved
3. Run the command adb reboot sideload. You phone should reboot into recovery mode
4. Navigate to the directory the image is located in and run the command adb sideload [image] where the image is the filename of the image. In my case it's lineage-18.1-20210415-nightly-taimen-signed.zip. The update took less than 5 minutes, though your results may very depending on file size and if you're using USB 3.0.
5. Once the update is completed, tap "Reboot system now" on the recovery screen on your phone

Nothing much has visually changed, but we can confirm we're running Android 11 by going to Settings > About and checking the Android version.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to hey@chuck.is.