> The battery life seems short. I'm pretty sure that I charged it up to 99% when I plugged it in this afternoon. It's now 10pm and I just went to check something in Firefox and found that the battery has died already. And I haven't exactly been using it heavily. It's possible that I misunderstood how much I had charged it, but so far this is a bad sign.
Battery life is an area that may be difficult for smaller phone makers to compete on. I think Apple especially puts a ton of engineering effort and coordination into making iOS and their apps work efficiently with their hardware, reducing complexity, runtime cycles, and power consumption as much as possible, on top of already highly-efficient ARM hardware.
Over years of doing that (kaizen), the result is optimized hardware/software fusion with industry-leading battery life. But it seems like it takes a non-trivial amount of additional engineering time and effort to accomplish this, that will be difficult to match by smaller mobile tech startups.
I hope the open source community around Librem and Pine will be able to replicate that effort, but I'm not sure this kind of consistent incremental upgrade work is attractive enough to volunteer FOSS developers. And being maximally effective at it most certainly requires the parent company to coordinate the effort across hardware, software, internal teams, and external volunteers.
It depends. I think one or two dedicated engineers could spend some time and make a huge improvement.
I worked on an embedded system with an Allwinner chipset. We tried to reduce power consumption, not to save battery since it was a cabled system, but to reduce heat. It turns out nobody, not Allwinner who provided the BSP, not the board designer, nor the final customer who developed the application software cared to optimize the OS much. The CPU had four cores, but only one was occupied most of the time. But all cores were at 100% frequency. Configurable voltages were also all on the upper edge. I enabled frequency scaling, switched to the correct scheduler, and now the board was much cooler and ran with more than twice the performance.
I'm always surprized how many low-hanging fruit there are in these kind of systems.
I don’t think they’re going to be able to improve battery life for much. Not even with lots of FOSS developers throwing hours at it.
I’ve read somewhere recently that in order to keep the phone mostly free of proprietary firmware, Purism had no choice but pick lots of discrete components. That would be in contrast to most other smartphone designs with more closely integrated chipsets, they wrote.
That discrete-ness, according to the author, is likely to be an upper bound for battery lifetime on the Librem 5. After all, all those chips have to be powered at least part of the time, and that allegedly consumes more energy than a single package would.
In other words: the Librem 5 may never gain a decent battery lifetime. As drivers mature, battery usage may improve a little. But not much. Buyers may want to keep their hopes realistic.
Reading the Librem app docs it seems like apps are GNOME programs packaged with an manifest. I can’t find anything about app lifecycle.
To be able to conserve battery apps works differently than programs, apps can be suspended. That is usually the problem with normal programs, they are not developed with battery conservation in mind.
I wonder how Librem have solved this, perhaps in their scheduler, or intends to solve this in the future.
Maybe. Android works across tons of devices and the difference in battery life doesn't jump out to me compared to the fruit company. Linux on a laptop gets similar battery life to Windows in my experience, and that's without using kernel patches and crazy settings, etc.
"WiFi works, no setup required beyond selecting a network and entering the password.
Calling works, no setup required beyond installing a SIM card and rebooting.
SMS works, no setup required beyond installing a SIM card and rebooting."
> If you don't care that your phone is spying on you, then the Librem 5 is not for you.
I don't agree - you may not care about spying much, but you can still want a handy fully hackable GNU/Linux computing device in your pocket as your mobile phone, that belongs to you and not the vendor; in which case, the Librem 5 may be the perfect choice for you as well :)
> Backups (...) "Unable to find supported SSH command"
Hah, sounds like a missing package dependency! Most likely missed because, well, who doesn't install ssh on their phone right away anyway? ;)
> I installed telegram-desktop with apt and it automatically shows up in the app launcher, which is a good sign, although it doesn't work.
Seems like `qtwayland5` package needs to be installed, otherwise Qt apps go through XWayland. I know that people are using telegram-desktop successfully.
> but by this time it was a bit darker, and this was the best I managed to do:
> It's more annoying than struggling with the autofocus on the OnePlus One.
There's an update coming that changes the focus scale in a way that makes it much easier to work with. Still not exactly pleasant, but it's definitely better :)
> I can't find an option to turn off notification sounds short of turning the volume down to 0.
It's in the quick settings accessible from the top bar - a bell icon allows you to toggle notifications between audible, vibration-only or completely silent.
> The browser has no "stop" button.
It's in the hamburger menu.
> the "please take me to the launcher" arrow being mere pixels away from the "please input a space" button
That's being taken care of, as the current implementation was always meant to be temporary - both top and bottom bars are supposed to be operated by swiping: https://social.librem.one/@agx/107220158614198549
Overall, glad to hear that you're happy with the phone :) Thanks for sharing!
I'm most curious how this impression is going to age over the next year or two, considering the new competition with the Pinephone Pro that's coming out. While Kudos to Purism is certainly due for developing the Librem 5 in the first place, and for kickstarting projects like Phosh[2] which is now used by many mobile Linux distros, they're really struggled (as mentioned re: timeline in this article) with shipping hardware.
Conversely, Pine64 hardware seems to have a pretty dedicated developer community among the various mobile Linux distros, and considering the significantly improved specs of the Pinephone Pro over the original model, I'm wondering how many people will opt for the even-more-expensive Librem 5 in the future after the Pro has been out for a bit and some of the early-adopter kinks have been worked out, considering the issues Purism has had seemed to have with reliably getting inventory out.
> considering the new competition with the Pinephone Pro that's coming out
Heh, with how the developers cooperate, you would never know there was competition.
But seriously, if you do want to fund Mobile Linux, buy a Librem 5. Purism funds dedicated GNOME/Phosh/etc. devs to work on making Mobile Linux a polish experience, and many of them also help to make sure it works on the Pinephone/Pinephone Pro. Heck, sometimes I think many of their employees spend more time helping out Mobian users on a Pinephone than they do Librem 5 users.
As much as I like Pine64 (I think making a $150 Linux Phone was an amazing idea!), they exclusively only fund the hardware development. Drew Devault has, IMO, a good overview of criticisms of Pine64: https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....
However ... Pine64 (Pine Store Limited) is a Hong Kong based company, and with China's appetite for mass privacy infringements (see their social credit system), there could be a problem there in the future, especially since privacy is the main selling feature of these phones.
It's an interesting article (and thanks to the author for putting it out) but I wonder what their end goal is. Is it to have a 100% secure/private phone? I'm not sure if that's possible with the proprietary firmware (though the hardware kill switches are certainly a good idea). Most importantly, the questionable usability means that either the Librem team needs to work much more, or... this becomes a "smarter" alternative to a dumb brick without giving data to Big Tech. (Ignoring the fact that a sim card automatically makes you lose privacy to the government/telecos).
When comparing against something like a Pixel running GrapheneOS, it's honestly a bit more puzzling to me. Granted, I'm definitely not the audience for this, but with G_OS you can do most things that a regular phone can do, without taking several minutes to install Firefox.
As much as I love privacy (going as far as having a semi-random username), this phone is a bit puzzling. I hope someone can throw more light on this.
The general idea behind any 'pure' Linux phone is to have a device that you can trust at least as much as a desktop running Linux. Security is definitely a key aspect for many. But it's also the flexibility of not being locked in to anything on the software side. Ideally, it also extends the useful life of the device as when vulnerabilities and bugs are found, they can be fixed rather than junking the device for lack of updates. It's still pretty early days re: 'full' Linux on mobile and so it doesn't look like much yet... it takes time. Desktop Linux didn't look like much in 1994 either.
I'm not familiar with GrapheneOS but I assume it follows the usual model when repurposing Android devices of taking various closed source blobs (i.e. drivers etc) and rebuilding the open source bits around them? If so, this approach usually locks you into a Linux kernel version to remain compatible with the blobs which limits you on kernel features and fixes as well as who knows what exposure the blobs have to offer, which also will likely never get updates.
Answering personally, I seem to be 'the swing voter' demographic for this phone - I have gone to their site many times, but have never paid them a dollar. I'm interested less because of what I could do with this phone - apple works great for me - but because I'm interested in how much the hardware can be open sourced, can a phone or laptop be built where only the low level components are sourced from existing manufacturers, without needing google or apple etc to curate the assembly. I like the idea of having what I have with apple, but not having apple or google or anyone own the ecosystem.
Apart from the fact that it's custom hardware designed to run Linux, (you buy this for the same reason you buy System76 or Purism's other hardware, even though you could build your own machine or install Linux on hardware built for Windows) I would much rather have a phone built on Linux than a phone built on Android. Android really doesn't offer anything more on a fundamental level than Google-made ease-of-use layers and a development platform that I can really take or leave.
I run Arch Linux on all my devices with no Desktop Environment. The simpler the system the better. Running Android Framework along with a runtime, even though it's all open source, I'd rather as much of it be free software as possible. If I could run my phone like this I absolutely would but the Librem 5 is as good as it gets while still having a device that fits in my pocket that can make calls and text.
We really should not consider linux phones (and desktops!) secure. It’s only secure by obscurity and by not being a valuable target at all — they have no sane sandboxing, hardware kill switches are pretty much useless in that if you can’t trust the OS you are already lost, etc.
GrapheneOS is a secure option as well as ios. But security doesn’t come for free and not a binary thing.
For full context, it was a preorder for a crowdfunded device that was still in development. It started shipping in 2020, but the preorder queue is still being fulfilled (it was slowed down a lot due to the pandemic and its still ongoing chip shortage).
As of March 21, 2022, I have not received my order yet. When given the option, I selected to receive the completed phone, rather than a beta build. Thus, the delay.
Mainly, I did not order this to just have a phone (as I have several older Androids). I wanted to help fund an alternative to the Android / Apple ecosystems.
There are even people who ordered in 2017 who still haven't got their phones. Purism also doesn't want to give out refunds (despite having a refund policy). It takes people hundreds of days to get a refund.
I wish VoIP was better supported on phones, but I’m guessing the phone manufacturers wouldn’t dare annoy the big carriers by offering alternatives?
Circuits on packets on circuits on packets is a problematic thing, I guess?
I don’t really want SMS, MMS, or raw calls if I can use email, IM, and VoIP.
Even in iOS the VoIP clients are pretty thin on the ground. Bria is still the best one? It feels like “wifi calling” is probably VoIP but it without the ability to change your sip provider. Argh!
The GNOME Calls app in the Librem 5 can do SIP calls, and the SMS/MMS app Chatty can do XMPP (OMEMO encryption is cuddly though) and Matrix support is being worked on (as in not enabled by default yet).
You can always get a PinePhone and switch those kill switches off ;-)
Delivering all the messaging apps on a GNU/Linux device seems like a difficult task though, from what I’ve gathered about apps that others and I tested [0].
"Those who would give up Freedom, to purchase a little temporary Convenience, deserve neither Freedom nor Convenience."
I know that, but Librem it's still too rough for me. I hope it will get better in the next iterations and I applaud those who buy it now, knowing they are also funding R&D for better future phones.
The hardware isn't the best. It has many usability problems. But if it will get traction, things will improve for sure. Not only Librem might get better phones out, but it might inspire competitors.
PSA for anyone outside the US: you may never be able to buy a replacement battery for your Librem 5 due to IATA restrictions.
So the Linux kernel may support the Librem 5 for life, but what’s even the point of all that effort if the phone is just going to irrevocably die on you after a couple of years?
You may want to keep that in mind before you buy one.
I ordered a Librem 5 last year but got aware of the issue only recently.
I have been waiting 3.5 years for my Libre5 so I would caution anyone before purchasing that it will most likely be even more out of date if/when it actually arrives
They dont say how many they are producing, nor how big their backlog is, nor how long it will be until they catch up, etc.
Pay us now and ONE DAY in the next few years we may deliver... who knows?
Also from the looks of it (the photos OP took of his new phone) the screen looks terrible. Maybe it's just the camera he used, but the screen seems to have a very visible blue tint and the viewing angles are not great). It looks like it was taken from a 2010 phone :(.
And yeah, camera being pretty much unusable in a phone sold in 2022 is not very good. I think most times I actually use my smartphone is to take pictures and videos nowadays, and I'm probably not alone in this.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|4 years ago|reply
Battery life is an area that may be difficult for smaller phone makers to compete on. I think Apple especially puts a ton of engineering effort and coordination into making iOS and their apps work efficiently with their hardware, reducing complexity, runtime cycles, and power consumption as much as possible, on top of already highly-efficient ARM hardware.
Over years of doing that (kaizen), the result is optimized hardware/software fusion with industry-leading battery life. But it seems like it takes a non-trivial amount of additional engineering time and effort to accomplish this, that will be difficult to match by smaller mobile tech startups.
I hope the open source community around Librem and Pine will be able to replicate that effort, but I'm not sure this kind of consistent incremental upgrade work is attractive enough to volunteer FOSS developers. And being maximally effective at it most certainly requires the parent company to coordinate the effort across hardware, software, internal teams, and external volunteers.
[+] [-] captainmuon|4 years ago|reply
I worked on an embedded system with an Allwinner chipset. We tried to reduce power consumption, not to save battery since it was a cabled system, but to reduce heat. It turns out nobody, not Allwinner who provided the BSP, not the board designer, nor the final customer who developed the application software cared to optimize the OS much. The CPU had four cores, but only one was occupied most of the time. But all cores were at 100% frequency. Configurable voltages were also all on the upper edge. I enabled frequency scaling, switched to the correct scheduler, and now the board was much cooler and ran with more than twice the performance.
I'm always surprized how many low-hanging fruit there are in these kind of systems.
[+] [-] squarefoot|4 years ago|reply
It would become very easy if they realized that a lot of users who buy a Linux phone would probably be happy to trade thinness for battery life.
[+] [-] dymk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hackbraten|4 years ago|reply
I’ve read somewhere recently that in order to keep the phone mostly free of proprietary firmware, Purism had no choice but pick lots of discrete components. That would be in contrast to most other smartphone designs with more closely integrated chipsets, they wrote.
That discrete-ness, according to the author, is likely to be an upper bound for battery lifetime on the Librem 5. After all, all those chips have to be powered at least part of the time, and that allegedly consumes more energy than a single package would.
In other words: the Librem 5 may never gain a decent battery lifetime. As drivers mature, battery usage may improve a little. But not much. Buyers may want to keep their hopes realistic.
[+] [-] tored|4 years ago|reply
To be able to conserve battery apps works differently than programs, apps can be suspended. That is usually the problem with normal programs, they are not developed with battery conservation in mind.
I wonder how Librem have solved this, perhaps in their scheduler, or intends to solve this in the future.
https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Guides/Design/Constra...
[+] [-] yeetsfromhell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
Interesting, possibly useful as a daily driver.
Also: link for the best pro comment about linux phones I've read on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26080871
[+] [-] seba_dos1|4 years ago|reply
I don't agree - you may not care about spying much, but you can still want a handy fully hackable GNU/Linux computing device in your pocket as your mobile phone, that belongs to you and not the vendor; in which case, the Librem 5 may be the perfect choice for you as well :)
> Backups (...) "Unable to find supported SSH command"
Hah, sounds like a missing package dependency! Most likely missed because, well, who doesn't install ssh on their phone right away anyway? ;)
> I installed telegram-desktop with apt and it automatically shows up in the app launcher, which is a good sign, although it doesn't work.
Seems like `qtwayland5` package needs to be installed, otherwise Qt apps go through XWayland. I know that people are using telegram-desktop successfully.
> but by this time it was a bit darker, and this was the best I managed to do:
You may be interested in this blog post about how to take the most from Librem 5 camera: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-photo-processing-tutorial/
> It's more annoying than struggling with the autofocus on the OnePlus One.
There's an update coming that changes the focus scale in a way that makes it much easier to work with. Still not exactly pleasant, but it's definitely better :)
> I can't find an option to turn off notification sounds short of turning the volume down to 0.
It's in the quick settings accessible from the top bar - a bell icon allows you to toggle notifications between audible, vibration-only or completely silent.
> The browser has no "stop" button.
It's in the hamburger menu.
> the "please take me to the launcher" arrow being mere pixels away from the "please input a space" button
That's being taken care of, as the current implementation was always meant to be temporary - both top and bottom bars are supposed to be operated by swiping: https://social.librem.one/@agx/107220158614198549
Overall, glad to hear that you're happy with the phone :) Thanks for sharing!
[+] [-] etbe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qchris|4 years ago|reply
Conversely, Pine64 hardware seems to have a pretty dedicated developer community among the various mobile Linux distros, and considering the significantly improved specs of the Pinephone Pro over the original model, I'm wondering how many people will opt for the even-more-expensive Librem 5 in the future after the Pro has been out for a bit and some of the early-adopter kinks have been worked out, considering the issues Purism has had seemed to have with reliably getting inventory out.
[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephonepro/
[2] https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Software_Reference/Environ...
[+] [-] kop316|4 years ago|reply
Heh, with how the developers cooperate, you would never know there was competition.
But seriously, if you do want to fund Mobile Linux, buy a Librem 5. Purism funds dedicated GNOME/Phosh/etc. devs to work on making Mobile Linux a polish experience, and many of them also help to make sure it works on the Pinephone/Pinephone Pro. Heck, sometimes I think many of their employees spend more time helping out Mobian users on a Pinephone than they do Librem 5 users.
As much as I like Pine64 (I think making a $150 Linux Phone was an amazing idea!), they exclusively only fund the hardware development. Drew Devault has, IMO, a good overview of criticisms of Pine64: https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_7832|4 years ago|reply
When comparing against something like a Pixel running GrapheneOS, it's honestly a bit more puzzling to me. Granted, I'm definitely not the audience for this, but with G_OS you can do most things that a regular phone can do, without taking several minutes to install Firefox.
As much as I love privacy (going as far as having a semi-random username), this phone is a bit puzzling. I hope someone can throw more light on this.
[+] [-] blihp|4 years ago|reply
I'm not familiar with GrapheneOS but I assume it follows the usual model when repurposing Android devices of taking various closed source blobs (i.e. drivers etc) and rebuilding the open source bits around them? If so, this approach usually locks you into a Linux kernel version to remain compatible with the blobs which limits you on kernel features and fixes as well as who knows what exposure the blobs have to offer, which also will likely never get updates.
[+] [-] monkeycantype|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinceguidry|4 years ago|reply
I run Arch Linux on all my devices with no Desktop Environment. The simpler the system the better. Running Android Framework along with a runtime, even though it's all open source, I'd rather as much of it be free software as possible. If I could run my phone like this I absolutely would but the Librem 5 is as good as it gets while still having a device that fits in my pocket that can make calls and text.
[+] [-] fsflover|4 years ago|reply
https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/
[+] [-] kaba0|4 years ago|reply
GrapheneOS is a secure option as well as ios. But security doesn’t come for free and not a binary thing.
[+] [-] braingenious|4 years ago|reply
“In February 2018 I placed an order for a Librem 5. Today it finally arrived.”
[+] [-] seba_dos1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anw|4 years ago|reply
As of March 21, 2022, I have not received my order yet. When given the option, I selected to receive the completed phone, rather than a beta build. Thus, the delay.
Mainly, I did not order this to just have a phone (as I have several older Androids). I wanted to help fund an alternative to the Android / Apple ecosystems.
Hopefully soon.
[+] [-] ThrashBeard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charcircuit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __d|4 years ago|reply
I did order a Mycroft Mark II though, so I feel the pain.
[+] [-] macrael|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorgoiler|4 years ago|reply
Circuits on packets on circuits on packets is a problematic thing, I guess?
I don’t really want SMS, MMS, or raw calls if I can use email, IM, and VoIP.
Even in iOS the VoIP clients are pretty thin on the ground. Bria is still the best one? It feels like “wifi calling” is probably VoIP but it without the ability to change your sip provider. Argh!
[+] [-] linmob|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|4 years ago|reply
It would reduce the complexity and price. I can’t recall the last time I really needed to make or take a “phone” call. That shit’s legacy now.
Just give me all the messaging apps and a good browser. Perhaps a clamshell design with a physical keyboard.
[+] [-] linmob|4 years ago|reply
Delivering all the messaging apps on a GNU/Linux device seems like a difficult task though, from what I’ve gathered about apps that others and I tested [0].
[0] https://linuxphoneapps.org
[+] [-] DeathArrow|4 years ago|reply
I know that, but Librem it's still too rough for me. I hope it will get better in the next iterations and I applaud those who buy it now, knowing they are also funding R&D for better future phones.
[+] [-] raverbashing|4 years ago|reply
But I agree, Librem does look a bit raw to me. I'm ok with 'apt get'ting stuff on my PC. Not on a phone
[+] [-] DeathArrow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsflover|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hackbraten|4 years ago|reply
So the Linux kernel may support the Librem 5 for life, but what’s even the point of all that effort if the phone is just going to irrevocably die on you after a couple of years?
You may want to keep that in mind before you buy one. I ordered a Librem 5 last year but got aware of the issue only recently.
[+] [-] fsflover|4 years ago|reply
Except if Purism opens a store in Europe. And they intend to (not that there is a big progress currently).
[+] [-] unobatbayar|4 years ago|reply
At this point, fliphones are very tempting.
[+] [-] fsflover|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fileoffset|4 years ago|reply
They dont say how many they are producing, nor how big their backlog is, nor how long it will be until they catch up, etc.
Pay us now and ONE DAY in the next few years we may deliver... who knows?
[+] [-] fsflover|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mangix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seba_dos1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ge96|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] carom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsflover|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camillomiller|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blenderdt|4 years ago|reply
I care a lot about privacy and freedom but this phone sounds like a Beta version of something from over 10 years ago.
Sad, because I really like to have such a smartphone. But not at the cost of being frustrated all the time.
[+] [-] M4v3R|4 years ago|reply
And yeah, camera being pretty much unusable in a phone sold in 2022 is not very good. I think most times I actually use my smartphone is to take pictures and videos nowadays, and I'm probably not alone in this.