With the Librem 5’s quick battery drain I am now using it as a portable computer that I switch on when I need it, then turn it off again, instead of keeping it running all the time like a typical phone would.
The L5’s boot time is pretty good, actually. But what is really annoying me is having to first enter the disk decryption key (unavoidable, I guess), and then my user password (6 digits) twice, on different keyboards even. Maybe I messed something up, stopping the automatic unlocking of my key-chain (third password)… but wouldn’t the disk decryption password be enough, on power up?
Has anyone done this?
For phone purposes I got myself a Nokia 8000 4G, after having seen I could not reliably use the L5 for that yet. It’s a KaiOS (FirefoxOS) phone for around 80 €. It has a crappy display, compared to pretty much any Android phone… but speech quality is good, and battery runtime is great: now I only charge this phone about every four days, with data turned off, moderate use (and constant stand-by, except for sleep time).
I think the problem with reducing the passwords on boot up is that the full disk encryption is independent of users on the device. So it will only unlock the system but theoretically you could have multiple users on the phone to sign in. So another password would be necessary.
Since PureOS should just use GNOME settings you could go into the users settings and try to enable automatic login for your user. However I would recommend whether that is supported by Phosh and its login screen first. ^^’
Otherwise I hope that Linux distributions start supporting systemd homed in the future which allows to encrypt your users home directory. It allows decryption via the usual login which is probably what most people expect from an encrypted device (knowing that personal data is secure rather that system files can’t be messed with).
Obviously both kinds of encryption are important but most people still expect convenience. Also full disk encryption becomes rather pointless when you actually start having multiple users on a desktop for example. ^^’
Yes … it should be up to the user. For me there will only ever be one user (human) using the phone so a second password at boot time could in theory be dispensed with. I wonder though that if you do an automatic login, you won’t be able to get the keyring to unlock automatically.
(Automatic login is available and works on the Raspberry Pi.)
Just to throw something else in there as well … I have a SIM PIN. So that needs to be unlocked too. I’m happy just to enter it but some people might want the whole catastrophe hinging on the disk encryption password.