I was tempted at the thought of this when I first got my L5, at least for my non-work personal device. But after the Louis Rossman video claiming that he had a leak from a Purism-related insider saying that the only way Purism could honor refunds was through the influx of new cache from product sales, I decided to buy a Librem 14 when I had some disposable income as a way to both support Purism and see what else they had to offer.
I have generally been pleasantly surprised, and find myself preferring to do tasks with the Librem 14 rather than bothering to dock the Librem 5 on my old usb C docks with a keyboard and monitor. In particular, moving around the monitors that I have is a little bit cumbersome because I was currently using rather large 4k monitors, and when I dock the L5 to them I always have to start by fiddling with settings to reduce resolution to 1280x720 [any more than that and it starts to commonly overheat].
Other issues that dissuade me from only using the Librem 5 are:
- the lack of OpenGL 4-ish support. I’ve been working for a few years on an open source OpenGL based toy program that uses a lot of RAM and newer OpenGL APIs, and the project is able to run on the Android Samsung I was using prior to getting a L5, and is also able to run beautifully on the Intel HD graphics of the Librem 14. But on the L5, it does not run because my shader programs are not compliant with the older versions of OpenGL and probably include novice mistakes that cause incompatibility – and even when I tried hacking around some of the mistakes, creating a black screen with some flashing colors as a benchmark, the Librem 5 was still getting 7 fps when these other devices were getting 60 FPS, perhaps because of the memory requirements of my project
- I’ve been using
vinagreas a VNC solution, and for some reason the controls that work great on the L14 are kind of junk on the docked L5. This might be solved by getting a different VNC solution, but I haven’t put in the time - Another one of my hobby projects includes an archaic desktop Java program (AWT/Swing + OpenGL) and for some reason that is again something that runs beautifully on the L14 but shows a blank window on the L5. It’s still amazing to me how the L5 has a working Java virtual machine and can run the Java code and is only hickupping on some visual thing – I can literally click buttons in the GUI and interact with the code even though it doesn’t allow me to see anything – but this is obviously less ideal than on an x86 machine.
- It is quite frustrating that I cannot dock my Librem 5 to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and charger in a configuration that works when the Librem 5 battery is completely removed. Being able to completely remove the battery would mean that I could use the device as though it were a desktop PC for arbitrarily long periods of time without any concern for over-charging batteries. The closest I got to this was a high-powered dock where I can plug in everything and start the convergent docked mode, then remove the battery while it is running and have it continue running without the battery in the configuration I desire – as if things were fine – for 10-25 minutes. However, after time passes, the device will randomly die and power off as if from some voltage issue.
All of the above issues are solvable and mostly user-created problems, so I am almost able to imagine in a few years if I spent more time on it and/or got a more powerful version of the L5 that it could conceivably become my MAIN computer as discussed here. Come to think of it, that 7 FPS issue mentioned above was only on the Librem 5; more recently I have a Liberty Phone with the 4 GB ram, and I might not have tested that project on it, having been simply preferring to the use L14 instead.