I started to reactivate my old moto g falcon during the last days of CyanogenMod in December of 2016. First step was a recovery update to TWRP 3.0.2-2 so I was able to flash CM13/14 builds. While CM14 nightly builds did not boot at all the CM13 builds did, but up to the last build wifi connections to the internet did not work. I could actually register with my wifi (Archer C7 running OpenWRT) but all apps claim the internet connection check failed and I'm offline. So bummer, without wifi a smartphone is not much fun.

I was pretty sure that wifi worked when I last used that phone about 1.5 years ago with CM11/12, so I started to dive into the forums of xda-developers to look for alternatives. Here I found out about Exodus. I've a bit of trouble trusting stuff from xda-developer forums but what the hell, the phone is empty anyway so nothing to loose and I flashed the latest falcon build.

To flash it I had to clean the whole phone, format all partitions via TWRP and then sideloaded the zip image file via adb (adb from the Debian/stretch adb package works like a charm, thank you guys!). Booted and bäm wifi works again! Now Exodus is a really striped down mod, to do anything useful with it I had to activate the developer options and allow USB debugging. Afterwards I could install the f-droid and Opera apk via "adb install foo.apk".

Lineage OS

As I could derive from another thread on xda-developers Lineage OS has the falcon still on the shortlist for 14.x nightly builds. Maybe that will be an alternative again in the future. For now Exodus is a bit behind the curve (based on Android 6.0.1 from September 2016) but at least it's functional.

Update: First nightly builds arrived, I did not yet test them. Lineage OS falcon builds.