Is there like some update to my phone or idk in another thread an important person mentioned that I check if the firm wares up to date to solve another issue I was having, so is there like something that maybe the phone needs or something I have wrong about it that’s making it do weird things? Or is it a combination of linux having to accomplish really hard things we’ve grown to take for granted as well as my lower service area?
Like idk really how to explain it scientifically or whatever to isolate a problem. But like sometimes I don’t get my girlfriends text right away and like today it was important what she was asking. She says my texts will come all at once sometimes instead of as I send them. I haven’t looked on her phone to verify times.
I do live in rural are and will get 2 bars in some places or sometimes it will just switch to another carriers service (that I don’t have service with) cause service is low and it gets confused. other times I get 3 or 4 bars. sometimes texts will say not sent even though they did sent and I was sending the same text over and over getting a red x when she got like 4 of the same text.
Also when I send texts it will sometimes delete them when I exit chatty and come back later. or if they are longer texts it will save them in the wrong order and put them higher in the chat after a few of her chats.
It doesn’t show the time that her texts send just the date which is more just an annoyance. It shows the time for mine but not the correct time. when I set the phone to automatically adjust the time to my area it gets the date right but not the time (I probably have gps turned off). So I have to leave it on manual and adjust the time and date to the correct time. Sometimes the date and time will change on its own in manual mode and be way wrong like a month and the internet wont work because it can’t verify the certificates on the phone. Idk if having the manually set the time and leave it in manual mode is messing with chatty.
Not as important as all that but like today I tried to record a video and send it it wasn’t a very long video but ended up being 11MB and wouldn’t send (or at least when I hit send it goes away as if nothing happens) Do i need another program to compress the files before sending (where as other phones automatically compress them).
Is there a way to record and send voice memos in chatty? I downloaded a program to do it, but after I record it, I have to then first export it and save it to a folder then go to chatty and attach that file but if the file is over 20 seconds it wont send which isn’t helpful. the flip phone I have can record and send a 10 mins audio file.
Sorry for the rant but if I can’t get reliable texts I may have to look for another phone. I’m also not like super code minded, i can follow directions but its not something I just know what to look for on my own.
General observation: Mentioning a whole heap of different problems in one post can make for a confusing discussion.
Normal Linux behaviour is that you yourself must manually set the name of your timezone.
You can check into whether that is correct by doing e.g.
cat /etc/timezone
and
ls -l /etc/localtime
Linux will handle:
automatic adjustment for Daylight Savings Time if DST applies at all in your timezone, and
automatic correction of the clock itself, which will drift slowly over time (however this relies on having an internet connection e.g. WiFi working at home, as your device will periodically ask a time server on the internet what time it is).
While in principle GPS could be a part of the first step (choosing the timezone), I don’t think that that happens.
I would definitely leave the device to handle time automatically, not manual.
Are you experiencing the situation where you don’t put the phone on charge in time and so the battery goes completely flat? If so, that will complicate its efforts at keeping the right time.
Send how? Email? MMS?
Most mobile service providers will impose some limit on the size of video that you can send with MMS. You would have to ask your provider what limit they apply. Of course there can also be a limit on the size of email that you can send but the email limit is usually a much higher limit.
Unfortunately I don’t know what video format is produced and what video format parameters apply.
It may help though to say how many seconds your video was that resulted in an 11MB file.
What program was that? What audio format is it creating? With what audio format parameters? What file size does “20 seconds” correspond to?
By way of example, uncompressed, entry level voice recording would be 8KBytes/sec. So 20 seconds would be 160 KBytes. (More technically, by entry level I mean 8 bit samples, with 8kHz sample frequency, and Mono i.e. only one channel.)
I’ve been using Librem 5 with PureOS as my phone daily driver since 2023 and I just wanted to chime in and agree that I have these same issues.
That is true from a technical standpoint but from a customer standpoint we have people in our lives who actively tell us something like “put your SIM back in your old duopoly phone, I want to text you” and the texting issues create a high degree of pressure to comply.
My workaround for this from 2023 until spring 2026 was that my SMS provider had a server that was capturing all my texts and calls and allowing me to access them or send/call people from their webapp. It worked miles better than Chatty and it worked on the Librem 5, but a month or two ago they bounced me off of it permanently and shut it down and deleted my texting history without me having really been aware they were going to do that. So I can’t recommend them.
I’ll chime in on the SMS/MMS issue. I’ve been a daily driver, since at least 2023 (was an Evergreen batch preorder) as well. I’ve rarely lost an SMS message. MMS is less reliable, but there have been explanations given in these forums.
My Apple and Android using friends also report missing SMS messages at about the same rate I have seen with the Librem 5, so I can’t say I’d be better off with those phones for SMS. I think a lot depends upon carriers and signal strength.
For MMS issues, I usually get texts but miss out on pictures, if my phone is suspended or not in use. I usually get everything, if actively using my phone, which aligns with the aforementioned explanations.