Reddit mentions of Supersonic SC-1010JBBT 10.1” QUAD Core Android 8.1 Tablet HDMI & Bluetooth, 8GB Storage 1GB RAM

> Tablet: https://www.amazon.com/Supersonic-SC1010JBBT-10-1-Quad-Tablet/dp/B00I9N5AYG

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To be honest from personal experience I have not had much luck modifying these Chinese tablets at all. They are cheaply made and the chipsets are not very developer friendly. I would not expect linux to boot onto it as the file systems are structured differently in android despite it being "linux under the hood".

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To say you can't install linux would be "inaccurate", albeit, it won't work with a desktop environment due to trying to grab hardware drivers. It would take a deal of software and hardware hacking to get that stuff to work properly. You could get linux, like the command line form, but not what you might think of as a "distro".

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Android is built on EMBEDDED Linux which to be frank and simple (though someone here will get mad) is different than a distro you find on the internet that you install on a PC. You'll need to understand Yocto (command tool that helps build embedded linux systems) and really at that point "build" linux for yourself. This would have to be done on a linux system.

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I'm not from Shenzen China where everyone and their mom has chip readers and clips to dump firmware files onto. You'll have to get that firmware somehow if you want to compile embedded linux for that specific tablet. If you think you'll just look it up online then that's where the next issue arises:

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It's hard to trace hardware from these devices accurately because they are often mislabeled or not tagged properly and sold to hundreds or thousands of private labels who make these tablets under various names. It's not like looking up a Samsung or Google tablet where you know that the hardware in there is in all versions of it, because they have their dedicated parts suppliers. Chinese vendors for these cheap tablets use what parts are in surplus and buy in bulk off auctions that sometimes are at a margin of error/tolerance outside of what large smart device manufacturers buy. Because of this, the parts in the tablet would vary batch to batch.

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If you can't take apart your tablet and have to tools or the know-how to pull device drivers and proprietary software code snippets (blobs/globs) from your specific device, then you're stuck trying to put any type of alternate OS on there.

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Some might tell you just use a Custom ROM instead; that's what "distros" are called in android so to speak. If you wanted a Custom ROM then you'll have to try and look up your tablet on XDA-Developers and see if someone made a Rom for it. You can give it a try but for the reasons I've listed so far, i'd doubt you'll find one for it, as it's hard for developers too, most of these projects on the most well documented devices are passion projects that are still very time consuming.

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Again, the issue for building a custom ROM (especially of this era of devices) is the android operating system is embedded Linux and you need to pull a device tree and propriety files or your screen, camera, ports, etc will not work and you just have a brick. Newer android devices structure the OS differently so you don't have to deal with that nonsense. This is especially hard for random tablets that are not from large vendors with developer programs where you can get device trees or the vendor makes tools for their devices that helps a developer pull that data.

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The most I can recommend is consider rooting the device and install busybox to tweak the system as much as possible. If you get root and busybox there's a lot that could be done.

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This is an older device so you won't see a bootloader unlock button in developer options like others suggest. You'll need to enable USB debugging and then get the android SDK developer tool package for your computer. you'll have to enable USB debugging on your tablet and connect it to your PC, then unlock the bootloader with ADB shell commands with your device in download/fastboot mode. you'll have to look it up on youtube. This will wipe your tablet. After unlocking the boot loader. you'll need to find a root script for your verison of android. I am not sure if Magisk has scripts for such an old version of android. Otherwise you'll have to find a copy of superSU and try that. Then in ADB you'll have to flash the root file (or in a more convoluted step, pull your boot file and mod it, THEN flash it) to have root access. After you have root you can modify that device on its OS to the limits of the hardware essentially. You can give yourself features of modern android ROMS (that was the point of rooting back in the day, and most people dont need to do it anymore) or remove things to make the system more stable like removing bloat apps.

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If you really want desktop Linux after rooting then consider using Linux Deploy. It's a root app that let's you run an entire desktop Linux environment on your phone, like a Samsung DEX. Then you can have a traditional distro-like environment, but your performance might vary as it's running on top of android.

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It's easy in this video because the phone he uses has an active dev community and Samsung makes it easier for devs to get the device files they need, they skip rooting and finding a custom rom in this video because of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eC-CH8UG4

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TL;DR: No you can't. (Not impossible, but really, really, really, really hard)

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I hope my post at least explains to you how you could do this, but also explain why it's very hard or impractical with your specific tablet. I've been trying to learn this for years on my own but it's still have not been a fruitful endeavor on these cheaper handsets. If you really want to tinker get a secondhand Legacy Samsung or google/LG device to mod.