After ignoring the issue for a bit too long, in 2023 I have started studying personal finance to understand where to allocate my savings and how to build a portfolio for my objectives. I’ll be honest, it didn’t take too much effort for me because I immediately got interested in the topic and I found it very entertaining to learn about economics and finance, since my previous knowledge was vague to say the least.

After being a Linux user for almost 3 years, I feel that the most miserable time I had was my ricing period.

I wasn’t enjoying to rely mainly on GUI, so I dropped GNOME (yes, I tried KDE and I hated it) and I started using i3 with a basic configuration. It took a couple of days to get used to it, but after the initial setback I started to really like using a tiling window manager, I had only set up notifications with dunst and left dmenu as launcher.
The problem was: it looked awful.

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.

My experience on manually setting up Secure Boot on my machine, so you won’t suffer like I did