I have an idea. My gameboy from 2001 has a hardware switch that turns the gameboy on and off. It’s still working fine 24 years later, seems like a great feature.
What if the Librem 5’s next iteration changes to have 4 hardware switches instead of 3, and the fourth one turns the Librem 5 itself on and off? This would be similar to removing the battery
Edit:
If Purism will not cave to my demands and add this switch, does anybody here have enough experience with CAD software and electronics to make a modified version of the open source hardware files that I could send to a 3D printer to print my own Librem 5 physical shell that has this added feature? Then I could disassemble the device and put my Librem 5’s physical board inside the new shell and gain the new feature without bugging Purism to do it.
A new shell is a necessary but insufficient requirement.
Yes, you will need a new shell in order to accommodate a fourth switch. You could even procure and install a fourth switch. But the switch isn’t going to switch anything unless you start hacking away at the existing board.
The enclosure is awfully cramped. I have my doubts that you could retrofit this to an existing Librem 5 - but for v2, sure, theoretically speaking.
Note that power management is quite complex. Cutting the battery won’t fully do the job since the phone can also derive power from the USB-C port e.g. when on charge or when docked. However perhaps for your intended purposes that can be ignored. There’s also the question of what power is cut to. Is it sufficient just to cut power to the CPU or did you want to cut power to all components?
Note also that it already has such a switch on the right hand side. Press and hold the power button for a hard power off.
But, as @lwriemen points out, this is a bit brutal. This is not best practice for any general purpose computer. Repeated use of said button can result in minor file system corruption, database content oddities, corrupt text files, … and that’s the best case scenario i.e. assumes that the software does detect and repair anything that goes wrong and that the software is coded carefully.
A nicer on-off switch would trigger a normal shutdown and if the shutdown and power-off does not complete within a user-configured X seconds then it would cut the power anyway. However obviously that can’t be just a straight on-off power switch.
My question does not come from a threat model, but instead from time spent among friends bouncing ideas off of each other about how we wish modern technology operated.
Here’s a new idea: if I hold two spare Librem 5 batteries together against the back of the device, it makes a thicker but similar profile that could still work for my uses as a handset. What if I make a custom backplate that fills the area of the normal Librem 5 battery, and instead connects a wire to the metal where the battery would have connected, and then links this wire to multiple librem 5 batteries stored inside this custom backplate up against the back of the device. Then I would get 2x or 3x battery life, and we could have the on/off switch inside this custom component, which when “off” would mean all power to the Librem 5 was off.
Some people use a powerbank for that. Mine is the equivalent of about 4 standard Librem 5 batteries (less after subtracting inefficiencies). But, OK, you don’t get an on/off switch with that arrangement.