Crimson Experience

Hardware Librem 5
21

I have not extensively tested the running time, but I do know enough about my current practices.

On my Librem 5 USA, I use the lowest brightness most of the time, only permit Wi-Fi, and use Firefox ESR to interact with the Purism community forums. In the Settings app, as shown in the screenshot at the beginning of this thread, I use the “Balanced” Power Mode, but do not enable suspend. Based on this configuration, every 1% of battery life is equivalent to 4 minutes, which in practice, becomes a total runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes. I take frequent breaks throughout the day so that I can extend the usage of my Librem 5 USA and achieve a holistically balanced lifestyle.

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22

Do you know if they’ve fixed that issue involving the wrong date being displayed at midnight. The date only updates at one minute after midnight, but this issue only affects the Notification List drop down, not the Lockscreen.

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23

I never experienced the problem on Byzantium or Crimson, at least not in daily usage. I usually power off my Librem 5 USA well before midnight.

I could manually set the time and date myself and find out later when my schedule permits.

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24

It’s not that important; I’m just curious. I noticed it last New Year and remembered because it is almost New Year again.

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25

The bug still exists, but the date updates itself shortly before the next minute.

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26

That’s the kind of bug I would leave forever as a “there’s always room for improvement” type of bug.

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27

Certainly low priority if it only affects a GUI display and fixes itself automatically within a minute.

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28

I have been getting /boot is running low on space banners after startup, so I decided to reflash my Librem 5 USA with Byzantium. My experience with Crimson has been fine, and it is very close to being my daily driver, but I will be demonstrating my Librem 5 USA to the public soon and need the hardware kill switches and related modules to reliably work on demand. After the demonstration, I have enough positive experiences with Crimson to consider reflashing it again.

A minor annoyance on Crimson was only being able to install one Flatpak application (Secrets), but not having enough space in /var for the other two Flatpaks I use: Lollypop and Shortwave. I decided early on to use Crimson for productive purposes, so while I was successful in proving such, I did not catch a break throughout.

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29

I am curious

  1. While on Crimson, what was eating all the space in /var that isn’t there on Byzantium?
  2. Is there any reason you are flashing your L5 to update to Crimson instead of just updating the repos in /etc/apt/sources.list?
  3. Did you try anything on Bluetooth and if so, was the experience any better or worse than Byzantium? (Audio stutter, MPRIS support in a car, anything)
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30

I never found out, but based on the research I did during that time, plus my experience just before reflashing back to Byzantium, I am highly confident that both /var and /boot are much smaller partitions on Crimson than Byzantium. There may be other partitions I am not aware about that share this trait.

Plenty, but the main reason is that I appreciate a clean, untampered slate to work with.

No, I have never used Bluetooth on my Librem 5 USA since I bought it.

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31

On Byzantium I actually have a major bug (some time later I realized it also happens with USB) that prevents my device from using W-Lan and from shut down actions (7s power-off button works). It’s maybe fixed on Linux 6.6, but I can tell more when it arrives (and I think it will on Byzantium). So there is also a chance that it improves other things, too. So let’s wait for next kernel update.

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32

If I recall, a Purism rep here said that just changing repos without reflashing can lead to problems with app dependencies, etc.

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33

Yes, trying to upgrade from one major version to the next major version (for any Linux distro) when the distro hasn’t specifically provided for that can lead to a mess.

This is doubly so when crimson hasn’t even been released yet !

It is always going to guarantee a cleaner result to flash from scratch, albeit that it is painful to have to reestablish additional installed packages, system config, user config, user content, …

That said, reflashing is probably not the right approach for /boot becoming full. The right approach is probably to manually uninstall excess packages and/or investigate what is using the space.

Can you post the size of /boot from your phone?

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34

Provide a command for me to execute. If you have one for /var too, I can provide an A-B comparison between Byzantium and Crimson tomorrow.

35

On byzantium (well, my phone specifically):

df /boot
Filesystem     1K-blocks   Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1    461087 191921    245358  44% /boot

So that means that /boot has been allocated about 450 MiB (472 MB).

Each kernel version seems to be about 96 MB, so I would not have more than 2 kernel versions (except during a kernel upgrade, when I will temporarily have 3).

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36

PS On my phone /var is on the root file system so df / is the answer for that but, unless your disk is actually basically full, there shouldn’t be a problem with /var

1 Like
37

Thanks for this feedback, it’s promising.
Just one thing a didn’t find is the call/sms/mms statue? Do they work fine?

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38

For what it’s worth, (I don’t want to jinx it, but) there has been exactly zero BT audio stuttering for me since the upgrade to 6.6.0-1-librem5 on my L5 a few days ago.

Kernel upgrades in the past haven’t made many huge changes but I swear things improved (not just BT) since the 6.6.0 update.

3 Likes
39

So if I have a L5 running PureOS Byzantium and wanted to try Crimson on it, how would that be done?

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40

Sounds good. I really want to try it out, but I want to stay on stable Byzantium until Crimson release is also stable. The only reason I restart my ppc is that usb/bt bug.

1 Like