Convergence Issues

Hardware Librem 5
1

Anybody else notice the convergence is not working very well right now? My phone is totally up-to-date. I spend a large part of my day messing around with power cords, turning off suspend, back-and-forth, nothing really worked. It would shutdown periodically for no apparent reason. I assumed it was a suspend issue but I made sure that was all check to “no screen turn-off”, no sleep/suspend, etc.

This all worked pretty well before. Same cords, same adapter. Not sure why this is now a problem.

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Please explain how part it didn’t working? as not many peoples are Gurus to guessing.
Also consider that Convergence Mode will start work when GLES3.0 is on Librem 5.

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Thanks. I plug it in, the monitor sometimes does or not turn on. If I unplug the power cable and replug it in, the monitor sometimes appears, sometimes not. I check the display box on the phone and try to set it to single display or mirror display - sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. When it does work, I watch a video or use the device. Sometimes it stays on for 30 minutes, sometimes 5 minutes. Sometimes, it turns the Bluetooth or wifi off - for no apparent reason.

To me, it seems like a sleep or power issue. I am on my second adapter with HDMI, power, USB, etc. The both had similar issues. Lately, things seem to be worse. No idea why.

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4

Can you share a photo of all accesories to get Convergence?

Also i will testing Convergence for you here to checks some extra failures.

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5

So we are talking about a dock rather than a lapdock? It may help to mention what makes/models you have tried.

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Will do. I was trying to avoid a full blown help session but why not? I will get back to you.

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7

FWIW, I’ve seen a lot of randomness trying to use a Lenovo lapdock at work with my Librem 5; sometimes it works initially, and sometimes I have to retry a lot. I finally gave up trying. The dock I bought from Purism has never given me problems.

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Hi, are you referring to the Lapdock Kit that uses the NexDock 360 or the USB-C Hub that they sell?

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The USB-C hub.

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10

Rather than do a full-blown help session where I explain my use of a cheaper unit from Amazon, I think I will just purchase the USB-C hub and move on from there. Thanks for your input.

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11

I have not been doing much convergence use in a while but tried it again tonight. I have to say that I’m mostly pleasantly surprised; things are all still working with my device, and by using Invidious I was able to poke a hole through Google’s evil machinations and actually watch some videos for fun in the convergence mode as a way to test. I have seen other times that local videos are fine but network watching was throttled; but apparently Invidious overcame the Google throttling or whatever in a way that the official YouTube site does not.

This being said, I operate while ignoring some known issues:

  • My particular monitor is a 3840x2160 resolution 4K screen. When I connect to this with a dock, the Librem 5 uses its built in Linux kernel stuff and tries to assume it can output 4k but it cannot really. So the output that the Librem 5 thinks it’s sending does not display until I go into Settings and change the resolution to a lower value. In my experience 1920x1080 eventually overheats and has tons of issues but 1280x720 can run for long periods of time at a decent heat, especially if I keep the device somewhere cool.
  • The disconnect process when I finish with convergence often causes the device to restart, but that doesn’t really hurt the process of using it convergently.
  • The epiphany browser will flip color values (reds for blue, blues for red) on its visual outputs when docked to a monitor in some cases. I don’t know why, and I do not experience similar issues with other applications.
  • I never seem to be able to remove the battery and run battery-less while docked, which I find unfortunate, but charging through the dock is extremely slow so I guess it’s not really an issue.

I am not using the official Purism dock, and instead am using the most expensive USB-C dock that I found down the street at Staples. I hoped that by getting an expensive one, I would be able to remove the battery of my device while using it like a PC for indefinite periods of time at a time, but in practice although this dock does allow me to do that it will crash after ~20 minutes when docked without the battery, and it won’t start without the battery.

I wrote this post from my convergence setup on the Liberty Phone, while listening to music that was playing to my earbuds through the audio jack.

For me the biggest issue with convergence is that I bought a Librem 14 to support Purism, and it turns out the Librem 14 experience is superior to my convergence experience (and quite similar) so it becomes difficult for me to self-motivate to plug in a bunch of dongles when I can get the same software on a laptop that doesn’t require me to move around a big 4K monitor to use. I also have an OpenGL spaghetti code hobby program I wrote which functions on Intel HD Graphics but doesn’t work on the Librem 5’s GPU, because its shader dialect is different and has a lower supported OpenGL version. That is 100% a problem of my own making, and of the hobby program being specifically tailored to Intel/Nvidia chips purely by accident because that’s where I spent my time and because I wasn’t careful to follow the GLSL shader specs to the teeth.

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12

If you want a Librem 5-tailored Invidious instance, I suggest using mine:

https://forums.puri.sm/t/vps-usage-suggestions/21788/27?u=franklyflawless

There are other privacy front-ends I provide within the thread if you want to benchmark your devices against them as well.

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13

As far as I’m concerned, all is not well with convergence. Today, the first time I plugged in the hub, nothing happened. The 2nd time, the locked screen image appeared, but the mouse cursor didn’t and I couldn’t do anything, either with the mouse or the screen. I unplugged and plugged it in again 2 times, but the TV wasn’t receiving a signal. Last month, I made several tests: the image appeared on the TV screen, the mouse cursor and keyboard worked fine. But no browser would open when I started them up. I couldn’t surf the Internet. Open office documents are very difficult too. In short, I’ve had 2 hubs since Christmas 2023 (including the one offered by Purism), I’ve made about 30 attempts, and I’ve never had any problems. Sometimes I’ve been able to listen to videos recorded on the L5USA’s memory card on my big screen. Do you have any solutions?

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

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If you have other ideas or suggestions, mention them in the respective thread, preferably with clear documentation and install steps.

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I have a Nexdock, and since I got my replacement phone back I have noticed that I’m getting some strange behaviour when connected to it, for example I think Network Manager is crashing because I’ll go to do a sudo apt update and it just hangs there doing nothing. Only a forced shutdown (does not gracefully shut down on it’s own) resolves the issue. I need to dig into the logs more to see what’s going on but that’s what I’ve noticed.

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18

That is a kernel issue. See this post pulseaudio not starting

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19

Thanks for the heads up…so wait for a fix I guess.

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20

I would downgrade

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21

I was wondering if it wasn’t something to do with a kernel issue or something. How might a person downgrade the kernel again?

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22

I just used sudo flash-kernel --force 6.5.0-1-librem5
(That worked on my old phone that I haven’t reflashed but my one that has been reflashed it did not work on.)

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