Almost three years with the Librem 5 as my only phone - and upgrading to Crimson

Hardware Librem 5
1

Hello everyone,
Long time no speak! $real_life getting on the way.

It took me a very long while to upgrade to Crimson. I was going to wait for the full final release (because this is my only device), but I thought I would be way more useful if I could test Crimson and give feedback.

My setup remains the one described here with my storage configuration described here. I still unfortunately use Signal under Waydroid. The only change now is that I’ve replaced the battery and only charge it to 2/3, unless I am going out for a very long time.

Upgrading was almost painless. I only had 1GB free on the eMMC, so I:

  1. dd my phone.
  2. Backed up my Authenticator keys to my SD card.
  3. Backed up my GFeeds RSS subscriptions to the the SD card.
  4. Uninstalled Authenticator, Pure Maps and GFeeds.
  5. Commented out the repository for speedtest.net. (not user friendly at all)
  6. Commented out the repository for waydroid. (not user friendly at all)
  7. Commented the repository for Azure CLI (sadly… $DAYJOB).

Suddenly, I had 5GB free, so I decided to just uninstall all flatpaks (uninstall –all). And voila, I suddenly had 13GB free. (I hate flatpaks - the idea is great but it just has zero respect for your disk space, just like Windows stuff). PS: I only had Authenticator, Feeds, Pure Maps and Parlera as flatpaks. Flatpaks leave a lot of junk behind for some reason. (Or I am too stupid, anyway).

  1. I ran the updater. The whole process took 43 minutes. Everything went flawlessly.
  2. Reinstall Authenticator and GFeeds, import the backup data.
  3. Reenable my repos, apt update, bla bla…

The good:

  • The phone functionality is flawless. I get VoLTE at home, data works, voice calls work, I also get connectivity (voice and data) in the Americas with my European modem. SMS and MMS work. Voice calls (in and out) from Signal within Android also work.
  • It was a very easy process for anyone with a modicum of tech-savvy.
  • Now Chatty gives better error messages. It told me for the first time ever that I had 15 MMS stuck in the queue and the error message was helpful enough that I managed to configure it correctly and now MMS works. Yay!
  • Everything feels smoother now.
  • Geary is also better: no more ghost clicks!
  • Pure Maps is smooth again.
  • My custom mounts on the SD card still work fine.

The bad:

  • Files legibility is worse now: where I could read, for example:
    • Documents, 3.4K, last-change-date
    • now it reads:
    • Doc…..,3.4k, last-change-date
    • Tons of blank spaces - hope they are not learning from Microsoft.
  • The joy of beta software: apt update won’t update X because it requires Y, but Y won’t be installed. Not complaining, I understand it is beta, but yea, annoying.
  • Something on my phone still wakes it up 5 seconds after I put it to suspend manually and I didn’t have time to figure out what that is.

The ugly:

  • Gnome-software still sucks hard and endlessly. Why is it always stuck? Why the blank screens? Why does it go MIA after an operation and takes minutes to be functional again? Seriously… sudo killall gnome-software is now part of my DNA.
  • I am still stuck with Waydroid for Signal and my bank MFA.
  • Once every long while, I still take my phone out of my bag to find it burning and almost out of battery. Yes, I probably forgot to close Firefox and the phone woke up from sleep because of a spam SMS. Ugh. So no, the Librem 5 is still not at the point that I can use it like I use a screwdriver or a drill: by reflex, unconsciously.

Of course, I understand that most of the bad and ugly are not Purism’s fault. When it comes to their share, really, I have nothing to complain about. I only remember I use a special phone that I OWN when someone handles me their phone for something and I see the difference.

A while back, I watched an interview with Brian Kernighan and, at some point, he mentions that one of his frustrations is that “yes, I have this incredible UNIX-ish computer in my pocket, but I can’t do anything with it”. Well, we can, and it is a beautiful thing!

Of course, I don’t expect a handful of people deliver the 5-stars smooth-running prison that Apple delivers but, for a group with a microscopic fraction of Apple’s resources, hey, I am happy. I can do my banking, make calls, make Signal calls, show QR code tickets easily, print from it, check my email, do quick sysadmin tasks on the go when required, take pictures, listen to music, watch videos and when I open the odd Instagram link that a friend may send, it doesn’t force me into a stupid instagram:// url because it thinks I am on a desktop computer. YAY!

edit: I almost forgot. I am still stuck with having to flick the wifi switch a couple of times before it turns on and my phone didn’t use to be like this.

4 Likes
2

Thank you for your feedback! What about:

  1. general speed
  2. smoothness? Eg: simply scrolling Firefox webpages is jerky
  3. loose mobile internet connection after a while (known issue: bm818 modem. In fact Purism is testing new modem to sell).

Those are what is blocking me to use it daily. Sadly is still into my drawer! Hope PureOS Dawn + new modem will make Librem 5 usable as daily driver! Of course still missing optimized software too but, at least, device should be well set!

1 Like
3

That is really bad news, especially considering that there are so many file names with overlong fixed prefixes. (And why 6 '."? with 3 one or two additional real characters would fit/)

I’ve been upset about the proliferation of bland spaces in application and OS file names in unix like OS for over 20 years. It’s sad that it is still getting worse.

4
  1. General speed: better than before (probably because now my flatpaks are taking way less space and probably loading less different libraries all the time). However, when I open Waydroid, then it is basically the same. The speed is great when you using applications, but the web sucks.
    1. Fun fact: I spend 1/3 of the year in Latin America and 2/3 in Europe, and the Librem 5 is slower in Latin America. The difference between indoor temperature is just enough for me to feel the Librem 5 always unpleasant to touch here. It thermal throttles way more often, but the difference is not enough to bother me.
  2. Smoothness: For Firefox, it is page-dependent. Sometimes I open a text-only (or mostly text) page and it scrolls butter-smooth (for example, pluralistic.net). Other text-only pages, depending on CSS, are super choppy to scroll. I think the Librem 5 lacks the accelerations and a bit of the processing horsepower to cover how much the web sucks these days. Good pages with images always see a few dropped frames when scrolling through the pages. Now I use a lot of no-script addons in firefox and it made my battery life longer and browsing way smoother.
    1. Non-web stuff always scrolls fine, even 45mp photos in the document viewer. are super smooth to scroll. Even image-heavy PDFs scroll ok once the document is loaded. Scrolling large documents from the eMMC is way better than from the SD.
    2. The home icon list usually scrolls fine, unless Firefox is busy choking on the web rubbish.
    3. Example of web rubbish: the animated dots when loading the Purism forums. They use a lot of CPU on the Librem 5 and convey no information. If you lose connection, the dots remain there moving around and you will wait forever and drain the battery. The animated circle things while something loads in the background are very stupid (thanks apple for the beach ball). Give me a simple text status bar please.
  3. Loose mobile internet connection: I think it’s a sad combo between the modem and the carrier. I have the issue in Europe, solved via cron script to reset the modem if there’s no connection. When I am in Latin America, I never have the problem.

Honestly, veleno, it is good enough. Go for it. Even if Purism solves out ALL the issues, you will still see sometimes Firefox choking (you are running a desktop browser, after all), or the odd issue. This is a Linux pocket computer that makes phones calls, not a “sealed box smartphone”. If you start seeing it this way, you will see that it is and has been production-ready for ages.

I’ve said before, Purism should stop advertising it as a smartphone, or at least add big caveats. I think it would attract way more Linux users if Purism would sell it as a Linux palmtop that comes with a LTE modem and makes phones calls. Linux geeks would pour over it. When you sell a smartphone, you get your customers comparing it to Apple and its thousands of engineers and manufacturing resources.

5

Tell me about it… I miss the likes of old KDE or Windows 2000. Buttons that look like buttons. No web apps = consistent UI/UX. Making the best use of my screen real estate to actually convey information.

With the new Files and other GNOME-based apps, there’s a reduction in information density with no benefit (it doesn’t even make the objects better targets for touch). At least some bugs were ironed out so no ghost touching or ghost scrolling (or at least not yet). Geary is much better now!

Someone should unbury the interface design guidelines from Microsoft, Apple and Be from the 90s and toss all this rubbish away. And people should stop reinventing the wheel. Fine, you want to give your special touch to something, do it on your own devices. Computers and phones are tools and I should not have to relearn the stupid interface every couple of years.

6

This sucks in any context i.e. even on desktop.