Experiences with Lineage OS?

Domingo

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Jul 30, 2004
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Subject pretty much says it all. I have a Moto X Pure that has become a liability. My battery is dying in record time, often when the battery is showing 25% or more. Battery saver mode helps, but notifications (and even getting calls) = a total crapshoot in that mode.

Some users say to hold out for the Nougat release for the phone...which has been delayed for months and months. At this rate, I'm not expecting to get it before a trip I have scheduled next month. Others are suggesting a factory reset, which is almost as much trouble as just installing Lineage. Seems a decent amount of users are pushing Lineage.

So...with that in mind, anyone have much experience with Lineage? I'm assuming my normal Google store purchases and apps still work 100% fine. Any caveats I should be aware of? I'm not expecting a miracle fix for my battery, but I keep reading that Nougat and Lineage make the phone much, much better for those in the same boat.
 
Subject pretty much says it all. I have a Moto X Pure that has become a liability. My battery is dying in record time, often when the battery is showing 25% or more. Battery saver mode helps, but notifications (and even getting calls) = a total crapshoot in that mode.

Some users say to hold out for the Nougat release for the phone...which has been delayed for months and months. At this rate, I'm not expecting to get it before a trip I have scheduled next month. Others are suggesting a factory reset, which is almost as much trouble as just installing Lineage. Seems a decent amount of users are pushing Lineage.

So...with that in mind, anyone have much experience with Lineage? I'm assuming my normal Google store purchases and apps still work 100% fine. Any caveats I should be aware of? I'm not expecting a miracle fix for my battery, but I keep reading that Nougat and Lineage make the phone much, much better for those in the same boat.

Lineage is just CyanogenMod. CM was my favorite ROM for years. Loved it.
 
You could, you know, buy a new battery. :)

It's not that tough to replace the Moto X Pure battery, seriously, and if you like the phone but don't want to bother with that it's not that expensive to have a local shop do it, unless of course you live in the fuckin' boonies or something with no shops to work with.

As for Lineage, it's what was once CyanogenMod as we or at least most of us are well aware of, it continues to be a fairly solid fast performing minimally modified AOSP that works great on most any device especially if the device has "official" Lineage support behind it. The biggest issue 99% of the time will be with camera drivers because those are always proprietary and not part of the base OS so, you may or may not have issues with the camera on a given device and taking pictures or shooting videos with Lineage but that fault does not lie with the ROM itself because of the proprietary nature of those drivers.

I've never had a single issue with Lineage or CyanogenMod either that's worth even mentioning, if it's available for a device it's pretty solid even if it's a nightly build on a new piece of hardware that just came out.
 
The battery thing seemed logical, but the shops around here are charging $100 to do it and per Reddit (and Lenovo's forum) it seems to rarely fix problems. People are claiming to be on battery #3 and only seemed to have any relief after resetting the phone. I think it's a software thing. I've been waiting to reset my phone for months since Nougat always been "right around the corner." At this point it's starting to look that isn't happening before August. If I'm going to spend the day restoring my phone, I kinda figured I might as well just toss something supposedly better on there.

I guess I'll dig around and make sure the camera isn't an issue. I use a 3rd party camera app (Snap Camera), which hopefully still works. The Moto camera app kinda sucks and Google camera stopped working a while ago.
 
It's probably similar to that battery killing Android 5.0.1 bug which Google fixed in like 3 weeks. But my phone didn't get officially updated to 5.0.2 until 8 months later. So I had to install custom roms. That's when I decided to take a chance at going with Apple.
 
I don't really want to go back to Apple, although there were some major pluses to rocking an iPhone. I really just want a Pixel 2, but that's still 3-4 month out. I'm just trying to make my Pure last that long.
 
Not saying you should at all. I was just saying that I had my bias and refused to use Apple products mostly after my bad iMac and school computer experience. But that Android bug made me say nothing, not even Apple, could be that bad. That bug drained my battery and rendered my phone near unusable due to its frequent crashes; heck the phone app crashes!
 
The battery thing seemed logical, but the shops around here are charging $100 to do it and per Reddit (and Lenovo's forum) it seems to rarely fix problems. People are claiming to be on battery #3 and only seemed to have any relief after resetting the phone. I think it's a software thing. I've been waiting to reset my phone for months since Nougat always been "right around the corner." At this point it's starting to look that isn't happening before August. If I'm going to spend the day restoring my phone, I kinda figured I might as well just toss something supposedly better on there.

I guess I'll dig around and make sure the camera isn't an issue. I use a 3rd party camera app (Snap Camera), which hopefully still works. The Moto camera app kinda sucks and Google camera stopped working a while ago.

Try installing Accubattery. It seemed pretty accurate on my 6P when my battery started degrading significantly and was having the early shutdown issue that plagued a lot of other 6Ps. I replaced the battery in it myself for $10 and went from this:

Old Battery.png Old Battery2.png

To this with the new battery:

New Battery.png New Battery2.png

It definitely seemed like a 30% boost in battery life on top of being able to run my battery down to 1% instead of 10-30% before shutting down. So that app should be able to tell you if a new battery is worth it or not or if it's a software issue you're having.

My phone is like new again for $10 shipped. Though I already had some of the tools from when I've worked on previous phones and tabs, some of them came with the battery too though and my pry tool was like $8 on Amazon. The Moto X should be much easier to replace the battery on too since there's no glass or fragile parts to deal with getting the back housing off. Look it up on Youtube, it should only take maybe an hour to do the replacement following along to that.
 
Will give Accubattery a shot and see what it says.

Cool, keep in mind it takes several charge cycles (the closer to 1% you get it, the more accurate it will be when you charge it) before it can give you an accurate estimate of battery capacity.
 
Installing CyanogenMod turned a Kindle Fire HD I received as a gift from a nearly useless dust gatherer to decently usable tablet. So, yeah, great experience. I will absolutely install Lineage OS on any future Android phones or tablets I own.

I had no idea what I was doing going into it; watching the Rootjunky videos made it a breeze. Here's his playlist for the Moto X Pure Edition.
 
LOL, Accubattery is claiming my battery is operating at 47% capacity, which isn't exactly what I wanted to hear. Granted, I probably still want to go the Lineage route at some point, but this is going to be a rough 4 months waiting for the Pixel 2's. I suppose I'm just going to dedicate next weekend to hand-replacing the battery and putting lineage on this thing.
 
If it's the original battery then I'd say that's probably about right given the length of the time the Moto X Pure has been released. As for replacing the battery, it's not nearly as difficult as one might believe as long as you're patient and you take your time, watching the video, stopping it as needed, making sure you've absolutely got some kind of heat source (whether it's literally soaking a washrag in super hot water then squeezing out some of the excess then putting it inside a Ziploc-type bag to lay on the phone, or using a hair dyer, or an actual heat gun for such purposes) to soften up that adhesive because that's probably the most aggravating aspect of working on devices like that one with "sealed" batteries and assemblies not meant for general replacement or repair.

I recently had to replace the battery on an Amazon Fire Phone and my god, that was a nightmare because a) the manufacturer of the phone for Amazon put probably the strongest adhesive I've ever encountered to keep that damned battery in place which was utterly fucking ridiculous considering how tightly packed everything already was inside the assembly and b) I don't own a heat gun or blow dryer so I did actually make the Jerry-rigged "heat pad" from a washcloth soaked in water as hot as I could get it then wrung out a bit and put inside a large Ziploc bag then laid on the open assembly after I removed the back.

Even with that (and my concern about heating the battery in the process, didn't happen thankfully) it STILL took me like 15 minutes of slow careful prying with several spudgers and a few guitar picks (always a proper tool in a toolkit, oddly enough) to get that damned old battery out - once I did I just put the new one in, no damned adhesive at all because there's absolutely no fucking use for it: the battery is in a space that's designed to hold it, with slight edges to keep it from moving around at all, and after the back panel (another cover of Gorilla Glass with plastic) is reattached the battery STILL can't fucking move around, so, that's that.

It's a bitch, it's time consuming, and it's fraught with some hassles and your patience can be tested multiple times but, if you've got several months to go before the new Pixel device comes out and you won't dump the MXP and you want to keep using it then the hour or so this process could take you will be well worth it when you're back up and running with a new battery.
 
After hunting around for batteries, I found a place that would order the battery and replace it (with a repair warranty) for $80.
Got everything done yesterday and it's almost like having a new phone again. My morning news routine now only drains 7% of my battery rather than 20%.
I made it to 1% battery life for the first time in months, too. For the last 6-7 months I was lucky if it would make it to 15% before shutting down.
I'm still waiting on Lenovoto to finally launch Android 7 for this model, but I'm at least no longer desperate. Pretty sure making it to the Pixel 2's launch should be no problem now.
 
...and after roughly a year of waiting, Android 7 is really rolling out to the Moto X Pure at last! Grabbed it off XDA this morning. I can finally see all of those other emojis instead of a bunch of X's :p
 
...and after roughly a year of waiting, Android 7 is really rolling out to the Moto X Pure at last! Grabbed it off XDA this morning. I can finally see all of those other emojis instead of a bunch of X's :p

Lol, I'm amazed you've held out this long with that phone or without at least ROMing it.

I know Moto screwed the pooch on the X Pure, but I still like them and they have been supporting their Z phones pretty well so far. My wife's unlocked Z Play at least has received a security update every month this year since it got Nougat at the beginning of the year. If only they hadn't gimped the Z2 Force with a tiny battery and non-replaceable plastic screen that scratches too easily, I would have loved to pick one of those up. I think the Z/Z2 Play phones are better than the Z2 Force now because of those issues alone, plus the headphone jack they confusingly left off the Force phones but kept on the Play phones.
 
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