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.
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