It seems that the motherboard is dead, and that it’s a common issue with the 5a and I “should’ve known better,” despite it being impossible to find decent information on phones these days.
I got it because it was the last Pixel with a headphone jack, and because it had good official LineageOS support. But I compromised: giving up the SD slot was tough for me, and now that I’ve been burned by not having one (I typically auto-backup my Signal history and other things to the SD card) I don’t want to get another phone without it.
But the landscape seems bleak. The vast majority of phones that are officially supported by LineageOS are Pixels. It’s impossible to find easy information on which phones have non-official LOS ROMs. Search results are useless these days, and I also keep running into an issue where after researching a phone for half an hour I discover that it has some arcane process to unlock the bootloader that doesn’t always work, and the forum posters imply that the purchasers “should’ve known better.” I’m just at my wit’s end.
If anyone can suggest something that has decent deGoogled ROM support with the following features, I’d be very grateful:
- OLED screen (a must-have for my photosensitivity)
- SD card slot
- I am willing to give up the headphone jack in order to expand my options
You already said you’re willing to give up the headphone jack. That’s a good start, since there’s fewer and fewer models being manufactured with it every year. May I recommend you give up the sd card slot as well?
Straight out the gate: sd cards suck and will betray you at the worst time. It’s not their fault, they’re possibly the only kind of storage you can still buy that doesn’t have a controller. Just raw doggin blocks through a set of spring contacts in a high vibration environment. Into a flash with no over provisioning capability.
But you’re using it as a backup. That’s no good! It’s like using a spinning hard drive as backup but then shaking it around and fucking with the cable while it’s doing its thing (it’s actually worse because the ata standard has a bunch of ways of dealing with that, the drive itself has a cache and the ability to say “woah there, hold up” to the host and is overprovisioned so it can silently automatically deal with bad or damaged blocks.)
If you can, back up to something else instead and verify your backups. If you got a computer you can use it, you could also use a cloud service or something. It still feels weird to call something as simple as sftp a cloud service but whatever.
Good luck.
I do back up to my computer. But not every day, like I can with an SD card. I’ve never had an SD card fail on me, and having one has saved me when my Note 4 memory died. Having one makes it easier to transfer data between phones.
I’ve already given up removable batteries and headphone jacks. Why do I have to give up every single feature that used to be considered a basic necessity? Why should I spend so much money upfront for storage that I may not need, when I could easily expand it with an SD card if I need for much cheaper down the line?
I already tried a phone without an SD card slot and look where it got me. Installing the custom ROM was a pain. Transferring my data was a pain. The motherboard died with no warning, and now I’ve lost 2 months worth of data. I’m not doing this again.
i swear i’m not saying this to chastise you, but not every day and two months is a big gap. if you don’t want to spend the cash for phones with sd cards that are supported by lineage and backing up to pc every couple of days isn’t feasible, why not use a usb storage doohicky to back it up? you can get an m2 usb enclosure cheap nowadays and they’re small enough to fit into a pocket.
those m2 drives have all the stuff that most sd cards don’t and they’re cheap as heck.
i hesitate to recommend a usb flash drive as a good backup option because they sometimes suffer from all the problems of sd and there’s been an identity crisis going on with them for the last few years.
another option is some kind of cloud backup. most people trying to degoogle are wary of cloud services but there is proton’s thing, others that i’m not really keeping up with and hosting your own, which could be as simple as sftp to your trusty computer at home with key based auth and a high port forwarded on the router.
you don’t have to give up every single feature that used to be considered a basic necessity. you are choosing to. between the sd, price, age and lineage support (and you want it to be good lineage support, not some one off mess), you have set a very high bar.
i know that you said sd never caused you a problem before. that’s great! it’s not a very good idea to rely on sd as a storage expansion though for all the reasons i already mentioned.
Listen, I didn’t remember to take my medication this morning because my phone didn’t remind me to do it. I have to schedule my entire life with reminders in order to function; manually backing up twice a year when I’ve never had to before is pretty freaking good. The storage medium isn’t the problem. I have plenty of disk space on my computer. I need an AUTOMATIC solution that doesn’t rely on my plugging in something, and that doesn’t rely on a cloud subscription. Preferably not on having a data connection at all, because I often don’t have one.
I don’t need official LineageOS support. I mentioned in the post that I was looking at phones without it. I’ve had one on a community LOS build before and I was happy enough with it.
SD cards have worked for me for over a decade. I don’t have any of the problems you mention.
I get that I’m going to come across as rude for these comments, but I really don’t think I’m asking for too much here. I’m asking for two basic features that I need for accessibility reasons, one of which used to be ubiquitous. I’m willing to pay a pretty high price for a phone, but I need it to last. I’ve thrown away too much money over the last three years on a revolving door of phones that failed again and again for reasons beyond my control. I’m at my wit’s end, here. I used to buy a 2-year-old flagship for half of its original MSRP, throw LOS on it, and have no issues for 4 years or so. Now I can barely find a phone that can run LOS, and it fails within the year. I’m tired. Every time I have to set up a new phone it’s a huge ordeal. I’m disabled. I don’t have the energy to do this every 6 months for the rest of my life.
You’re not coming across as rude. A lot of what you just said was kinda implied by your tone and description of the situation.
Tbh it sounded a lot like me about twelve years ago when my phone died and I had to restore from an older backup. Given, the backup was only a week old but I was running hot back then and lost a lot of conversations and stuff. So it’s not out of a need to chastise you but instead from recognition that that kind of thing sucks and a desire to help.
what you’re talking about sounds very familiar. I rely on notifications for everyday stuff too and you might not but I get distracted easily and forget to do important things.
I moved out of cell service range about a decade ago. I was able to get by before there was internet at the house with a cloud based backup system and relying on always stopping for a long morning coffee at a place with free WiFi that was in cell service range. Five years ago they put a tower up so I don’t have to do that any more.
My recommendation to figure out how to get away from sd was not just because it’s an awful storage medium that fails silently and leaves you in the lurch, but also because it’s not ever gonna get easier to find phones with sd support. You said yourself it’s getting harder and harder every time this happens and you need to prioritize reliability.
If you’re willing to figure out a different way of handling your automatic backups I think you can get a reliable phone, it’s only gonna get harder, more expensive and more frustrating otherwise.
If you want, and when you have time, I can help you figure out how to get to a situation where you don’t have to do this every couple years.