I’ve been looking forward to try LineageOS for a long time, but my device was
not supported until recently, all thanks to
Linux4 from XDA, so I
decided to give it a try and write here my experience after a couple of months.
My First Time (Bricking a Phone)
I started tinkering with Android a few years back because my phone stopped
getting updates and I wanted to make some changes, so I needed root privileges.
The very first thing I did was bricking my device installing SuperSU.
I was stuck in a bootloop and I couldn’t boot into recovery, I was terrified,
but after 2 days of despair I managed to restore the stock ROM in download mode
using a tool provided by the phone manufacturer.
After the brick incident
I still wanted to try some custom ROMs. It was 2015 and there were some good
ROMs around (LineageOS, Paranoid Android, Resurrection Remix, etc.), but
everyone I tried had problems and performed sensibly slower than the stock one,
so I just went back thanks to a Nandroid
backup
I made.
I was not satisfied at all, so I tried to tweak my phone with another root
method: Magisk. This was the
breakthrough, and I got to root my phone with little effort, simply flashing a
zip file from my recovery. Magisk installed without any issue and I loved the
power it gave me over my phone: I could browse the whole filesystem, uninstall
applications I didn’t need, install modules to improve battery life, install
applications to automate various tasks and so on. Finally I got what I wanted,
at least until my battery started to last less than an hour of screen time.