irvinewade:
Note also that, as far as I am aware, there is no VGA or HDMI support, and video is always DisplayPort out of the phone. What you do with it after that is up to you.
What I meant is some other way to get video output of USB port with an adapter to retain convergence without DisplayPort.
For example, Purism laptop users reported that it is possible to use older DisplayLink USB 2.0 adapters under PureOS without proprietary drivers or firmware.
I got a USB 2.0 displaylink adapter that works with the opensource ugl driver. Specifically: http://www.win-star.com/eshop/goods.php?id=90
I use that for one monitor, and the hdmi out for the other monitor.
It doesn’t seem to use an obscene amount of CPU like I noticed with the closed source driver, and actually seems to work acceptably.
Last time I tried one of these with a fully free (libre) kernel, it worked as advertised, with no need for any additional drivers.
The CPU usage increased while using it, but not very much. This was on a machine much less powerful than the Librems. As long as the adapter was not being used with content that needed large areas of the display to be completely redrawn frequently (3D games or video editing, for example), I found the performance to be perfectly adequate.
ThinkPenguin also sells such an adapter.
Some also proposed to use multiple adapters to get multi-monitor support.
I think I’ve found that the i.MX8 is limited to 2 displays somewhere online but don’t quite take my word for it (phone screen+external hdmi via usb-c), so for the Librem 5 the displaylink devices are what we need to have a multi-monitor setup. I have an hdmi output via usb-c working fine at the moment.