CyanogenMod is a free, community built, aftermarket firmware distribution of Android 4.4 ( Kitkat ), which is designed to increase performance and reliability over stock Android for your device.
CyanogenMod is based on the Android Open Source Project with extra contributions from many people within the Android community. It can be used without any need to have any Google application installed. You will need to provide your own Google Applications package (gapps). CyanogenMod does still include various hardware-specific code, which is also slowly being open-sourced anyway.
Download and flash in this sequence
ROM
GAPPS (I use stock)
MMS Fix [Thank you SuperR]
This ROM was built from source with a manifest I wrote myself.
THANK YOU CYANOGEN FOR YOUR SOURCES AND THE BEST DAMN ROM TO BUILD OFF OF