Hello, I have Lenovo A536 and I would like to change android for pure Linux. I would expect from that longer battery life and instant responses, and no google.
I need these features: phone app for calling, sms, clock (with alarm), calendar, WiFi and web browser (preferably Firefox, not google), video camera. GPS and navigation is useful sometimes, so not on needed list, but would be nice.
Is there any option for me with this phone? Or do I need to buy a new phone (which one would you recommend)?
Thanks in advance for your help.
There are several Linux on Phones Projects around. NONE of them are in a state where you’d be able to use it as a daily driver.
The absolute best combination you can get at the moment is postmarketOS on a Nexus 5. And even that is pretty much alpha. It’s only worth it if you want to develop for postmarketOS or play around with it for fun.
If all you want to do is get rid of google and get some more batterylife out of your phone, go with Lineage OS with Google Apps. It’s pure Android without anything google in it. Your phone isn’t officially supported, but have a look at xda-developers forum if there’s someone building for your phone.
Your phone is 5 years old by now. Most people will have moved on and Mediatek Chips aren’t the most friendly to develop for to begin with. So getting a new phone might be the way to go.
Have a look at the Librem 5. That’ll be one of the first commercial Phones with linux on it. The PinePhone is a bit more out, but follows the same idea.
Finally, maybe a feature phone plus an ultra Portable linux machine is an option?
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I read about most of that already. Nexus 5 is also outdated 
I can not find any shop selling it. Librem 5 is in pre-order stage, and PinePhone also not available yet
“pure Android” can not imagine Android being fast, or battery eating, just because it runs on virtual machine.
I do not want two devices, there would still be the question what phone, but more importantly it would be two devices to charge, and one of them would be used only rarely so waste of money. I have laptop(notebook) so using phone is limited, but I still want that option for the rare use cases.
I’ve given up on android without google. They’ve made it stupidly complicated to deal with custom bootloaders and all of that. The last device I successfully de-googled was my Motorola G4 Play, which is still alive today. But I failed to do the same on the G6 Play, I spent way too much time on it and basically bricked it in the end. For a daily driver I’ve switched to a Nokia 6.1 with “all the google”. It’s cheap, it’s supposedly getting Android X and it does everything I need. I have a secondary SIM in my G4 Play for specific stuff.
Could you explain that?
Have you seen LineageOS on a supported device or Oxygen OS on a recent OnePlus Device? It’s incredibly fast. With my Redmi Note 5 Pro on Lineage i was getting 2-3 Day batterylife. But i’m not a poweruser and don’t have any social media apps on my Smartphone so…
Also
Forget about that. Good Battery Life comes from optimization (look at apple with their really small batterys). In most cases Linux on unsupported hardware would have worse batterylife than Android. So, maybe take a batterybank with you? Linux won’t change your Battery Drain significantly. More Capacity is all that can be done here (to an extend).
Me2. It’s just incredibly hard to do and the experience is often miserable. If you don’t like google at all, you’re much better of with an iphone.
Need to get it used.
So to sum this up:
- You absolutely, positively do NOT want android
- You want it available now
- You don’t want two devices
- You don’t want it to be outdated
- Ideally it should run Linux
I’m sorry, but you’re sol really. An iPhone takes care of points 1-4. There’s nothing you can do/buy now to do all this on Linux right now.
I never seen android phone that would be responsive, or fast, also I did not seen any Java application in general that would be really fast responsive.
Phone that (should) do nothing should have minimal battery consumption. Android on the other hand I never seen android phone doing nothing. When I run Linux on desktop CPU usage is much lover than on windows, it might be only the Google/Microsoft shit running hidden in the background and not being listed in running apps.
I do not have big problem with outdated, but if I can not buy it it is a problem for me.
“NOT want android because” it is bad OS from every point of view I can imagine, I get it for free (as part of another deal), I have nokia 3100b and I am still not sure if it was upgrade, or downgrade. It have WiFi with web browser, and GPS, but everything else is worse.
I have the Lenovo phone for 3 or 4 years, and it start to getting worse (random time and date, even if it should get time from network, I need to fix it every time I want to know the time), and battery life is only 4-5 days so not a big problem with buying new phone.
I think about iPhone a bit, but at first look they look very expensive, more than the Librem 5 preorder price.
There are videos of people using the linux on phone. Most do not tell which phone it is exactly, or it is one of the supported phone, but that phone is no longer available
Well I can safely say you have to be living in a different world. I have frequently been able to install other android versions that are much faster, last far longer on the battery and when they are off they are off.
My Note 2 was a world beater. Custom ROM and kernel that was tightly tuned and lasted days.
EBay? Or any other second hand online place. Even mobile repair places we have lots here that sell old second hand or refurbished phones. It is not impossible by any means.
Step one is to realize that Android actually is Linux. Android is running a (modified) Linux Kernel.
Most videos in that regard run a Linux Distro on top of that kernel. There are several Apps on the Appstore that will install for example Debian on top. You can then SSH into that with a terminal App or even use VNC to get a graphical environment.
This is completely different from running Mainline Linux On Native Hardware. And as i said, 90% of development in that direction use the Nexus 5 as their base. It was cheap, great hardware that was supported for long. It’s from a time where nexus phones where for enthusiasts. That’s why it saw a LOT of development in the early days and still is the prime candidate for getting weird stuff to boot. It’s also so well researched and understood in terms of hardware, that most of the work for it is already done.
You can’t just take a random android phone and start to port Linux to it. Trust me. I tried porting PostmarketOS to my Xiaomi Phone. 5 days of patching a kernel and no signs of a buildable kernel in sight. And that’s with a phone that already has LineageOS, so a working OS Kernel port.
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Yes, Android is Linux in some sense, but the only thing it has in common with, say, Ubuntu, is kernel and possibly glibc. The rest is completely different.
Back to topic, would love a modern Linux phone, the latest and greatest is Librem 5, problem is all Linux smartphones are premium phones.
Your best bet is to root and install Jolla on a supported phone, but yeah, more for developers now.
To be fair, Linux is quite limited in what it can do phone wise at the moment. So, something like the Nexus 5 can do a lot with pure linux on it. And it’s quite affordable. Yes, it’s a few years old now, but a lot of people run Linux on Thinkpads that are older and still think it’s the best experience there is. And they aren’t too limited in what they can do, other than gaming.
So, to tip ones toes in Linux on phones, the Nexus 5 can be a decent choice. It’s not “made for Linux”, but it’s close.
And the PinePhone will be much closer to a “modern midrange” to entrylevel smartphone with Linux out of the box.
I never buy any second hand product and I do not plan to. How you can buy something someone was using? If you do not know how it was used you can not know if it will work, or break in a week, or month.
I know the difference between linux kernel and ubuntu, I seen the source code…
I would try Sailfish OS from Jolla if I would found a tutorial
I look at PinePhone again and it looks very promissing and it is planned to be availible in Q4 2019 
so not that far away.
But on the other hand, if someone else has used it, then they would have found any manufacturing defects so it is actually more likely to keep working.
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I am not worid about manufacturing deffects, but what the users did to the device.
My old colegue have ne phone every month or 2 because he break the glass, he somehow make it less noticable and sell it, At least once he drop the phone to watter, but it start working after drying so he again sold it. So I am worried to buy a phone from someone like him.
Well in my case the place I bought it from tests the phones and they have a warranty so that’s all good.
And I don’t mind taking a phone apart to fix things, if possible.
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Dude, Samsung’s Android distro for the Galaxy S4 was not unresponsive. After getting Resurrection Remix OS on it, it was pretty nice and modern. After installing Kernel Auditor and selecting the “performance” CPU and GPU governors, it was very nice and without much stuttering.
It still is six-year-old hardware, so it’s not like I can play Honkai Impact 3rd at max settings, not to mention that I need a replacement battery, but the Android UI and YouTube are pretty smooth. Also, you don’t seem like you need to play games on your phone, so I think that a setup similar to mine would serve you well from the performance point of view.
Now, your rant here is somewhat incoherent, so I am not sure exactly what you’re trying to say in your second paragraph, other than that you had issues with one of your phones and that you think that Android is bad, but I cannot understand anything in the first sentence of the paragraph past the first comma.
If you can, please do try to not meander when writing, since some people might not be able to completely understand what you wrote, let alone misunderstand if the stars align.
Good luck with your mobile endeavors!
Funnily I am on a Note 3 (7 generations old! roughly equartes to years all for €220) right now and it is stock at the moment, though i have TWRP and root now so it is just a matter of backing up the stock rom and flashing what I want.
That said the Stock rom, old as it is (android 5) is really smooth and quick, more so than I have encountered on any other phone though thats not a large sample. I get there are bad low end phones out there that are overloaded with software and just not up to the job but that is not to tar all android phone with one brush, there are plenty of good ones out there and further from that WAY more you can do with very basic info to make them so much better if you really dont like the stock experience.
It is not like you are forced into something cheap and bad, you just need to actually look at whats available and can be done.
EDIT: Though i absolutely grant that the A536 is not a great phone when it comes to options for changes.
I would say I seen a lot of phones, even though my experience is still very limited, some of them was very expensive (even more that iphones), and no one of them was responsive. I do not know if any of them was using custom ROM (probably not).
I decided to give custom ROM a try, but last ~30 minutes I am stuck at getting SP Flash tool to work
Unfortunately I only have experience with Samsung phone when it comes to flashing ROMs. I don’t know the landscape for the A536 but if there is a custom recovery that is absolutely what you want first. After than all flashing can be done on the phone.
Regarding MediaTek stuff, good luck finding a custom ROM.
There are a few on XDA but only to about android 6. The MiUi 8 rom looks to be most popular and complete.
There is CyanogenMod stuff too but no lineage OS.