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F(x)tec never had all the driver sources. And even if they did, they would not have been allowed to publish them. A prominent exception is the keyboard, which is the one hardware component they developed themselves. The rest of the hard- and software came from a Chinese OEM. The idea that f(x)tec ever wanted to make the Pro1/Pro1X "open" phones is a misconception introduced by some media and bloggers. F(x)tec never publicly corrected that misunderstanding, presumably as they hoped to profit from all that "Linux-phone" hype. In reality, the Pro1 was designed as a pretty standard, proprietary Android device and is not any more "Linux" than your random Galaxy.

My first idea was to start with pro1x kernel 4.19, maybe the compiled proprietary blobs are the same or mostly the same as pro1. But I never found a 4.19 kernel built for msm8998... Maybe one of the guru of the company can help us with the driver sources? unless @EskeRahn is correct and the sources were part of the swindle, though.

Lineage-23.0-20251201-NIGHTLY-pro1x with November 1st security patch installed smoothly via OTA. MindTheGapps16, and root was maintained. 

The base kernel source is of course available as per the GPL2. Also, e.g., the keyboard-driver source is available as part of LineageOS. However, much of the device drivers that make up basic mobile-phone functionality are not.  The project of mainlining the Pro1 got stuck on such profane things like the touchscreen driver requiring some non-disclosed firmware magic to be usable in the first place.  Device drivers not being open-sourced is pretty standard in the Android world, though. Nothing specific to the Pro1 here. 👎

I think that for an OS like Lineage, which is supposed to be just Android-without-the-Google-bits, upgrading the major Kernel version will be next to impossible. The proprietary vendor blobs compiled for 4.4. will not load with 4.14 or later. That's just not how Linux works.  Yes, there may be some other ms8998 devices out there using later Android kernels. So it may boot somehow. But what's the good of that if your LTE-modem, camera, and touchscreen no longer work?