Frequently Asked Questions for the Librem 5

Coping this here, from Linux 5.10 kernel released
@amosbatto some minor updates to FAQ 2.10, 4.3 and 8.1 may be needed as mainline is now reality.

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Do those phones have UEFI and ACPI support, or SBSA[2] support? If so, can you point me to where I can read more about it? Google is failing me here.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25550359

(I am not able to reply to this question myself).

Perhaps, the question could be “What other OS can already run on Librem 5?”

It doesn’t have UEFI–it uses u-boot instead. To test whether it has ACPI support, someone who has the phone should do this:
sudo apt install acpi
acpi -V

To determine its level of SBSA would take hours of reading the spec and testing each thing in the spec, and I doubt that very many people care about SBSA.

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The following comment would probably be a very good explanation of why suspend is not working yet and what is being done to add it:

FAQ says:

Purism has been accepting pre-orders for the Fir batch at the same price as the first version of the Librem 5, but has not made any further announcements, so it is not known whether Fir will have more RAM, more Flash memory storage, or different components than the Librem 5 (Evergreen).

This is not true that Purism made no further statements. Here is one:

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There is a difference between “we will change something” and “we will change exactly this and that”.

Yes, Fir will implement changes, which we do not know yet.

Cheers
nicole

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Purism announced “Fir” on 2019-09-05 and @nicole.faerber made that comment one day later on 2019-09-06, and that comment doesn’t contain any more info about Fir than the original post. Since then, Purism employees have reaffirmed that Fir will happen on this forum, but Purism hasn’t released any further details about Fir.

What is wrong with the FAQ answer?

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Nothing is wrong. The FAQ could just be updated saying that the i.MX 8M Plus, first announced in early January 2020, is likely to become the power envelope for the phone according to not only to the existing FAQ link but also according to this link above I found.

Although you are right that no further announcements were made.

I added Nicole’s quote to the FAQ answer: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#71-what-will-be-the-changes-in-the-fir-batch-and-should-i-wait-for-it

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2.13. How well will convergence work to use the Librem 5 as a desktop PC?

Since that answer was written Purism published a couple of very good articles and videos on convergence. I think they should be emphasized here and be linked in the very beginning, especially the first one:



2.9. What screen does the Librem 5 have and why is it 720p instead of 1080p?

This question was officially answered:
https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/FAQ.html#what-is-the-resolution-of-the-built-in-display

So it would be good to have a link to it from the community FAQ.

2.4. Is Bluetooth 5.0 supported? What Bluetooth profiles are supported?

2.6. Why doesn’t the Librem 5 support new Wi-Fi standards (802.11ac/ad/ah/ax)?

Updated info on battery life: https://puri.sm/posts/charging-the-librem-5/

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Thanks for the link. I updated: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#21-how-long-will-be-the-battery-life-of-the-librem-5-evergreen

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1.5. How innovative is the Librem 5?

The Librem 5 was first to release a development batch, but PinePhone was the first to reach mass production, so it can be argued which was the first to introduce hardware kill switches.

The version of Pinephone currently available for preorder is called “Beta Edition”. To me it means that the previous “Alpha Edition” was also actually a development batch, even though it was available to more developers than the Birch. It definitely was not the final version of the hardware, too (it had a bug preventing convergence).

What is “mass production” anyway?

It’s a discussion, not a mathematical proof. :wink:

By every way that I can think to define “mass production”, I think that the PinePhone got there before the Librem 5, which isn’t surprising considering the design choices that PINE64 made compared to Purism’s design decisions.

If we define “mass production” as when a product has its full functionality available with only minor bugs, then neither the PinePhone nor the Librem 5 are at mass production, but the PinePhone is definitely closer to that state than the Librem 5.

If we are going to call the PinePhone “beta”, then we also have to call Evergreen “beta” or maybe “alpha”, considering the lack of FCC/CE certification and all the software dev work that is still required for things like the cameras, GNSS, OpenPGP, suspend-to-RAM, system wakeup by the cellular modem and WiFi, etc.

If we define mass production as when shipping a large number of the devices, then the PinePhone started mass production in June 2020. Maybe you can argue that Librem 5 started mass production in November 2020, but I don’t think 250 devices per month is a large enough number for that definition. At this point the PinePhone has shipped 20k - 30k units, whereas the Librem 5 is around 1200.

Another definition could be when the hardware stops changing. By that definition, I would say that the PinePhone reached mass production with v1.2b in October 2020. At this point we don’t know for sure if the Librem 5 will have any further hardware changes, but it appears likely that there won’t be any changes to v.1.0.2 of the schematics, which were released in November 2020.

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No debating this, but do you have a source for that? I would be interested. And I agree with your post :).
Just asking, because I know the size of the Mobian CE batch (sorry, non-public) and if the other editions are similarly sized, I would not arrive at that number…

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I disagree. Pinephone still have a backlight hardware bug making display blink from time to time: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13353, https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_v1.2b. It means that you cannot buy the final hardware now, whereas for Librem 5 you can. You just buy Librem 5, wait until software is ready and get perfect final device.

Those are just software problems. There are a ton of them for Pinephone as well. The point is they are temporal for both phones, while hardware problems are permanent. Except maybe certification, but did Pinephone CE Ubports have it? It also should not change anything. I would not say that the innovation does not exist without this certification…

This is not true, see above.

Here you suggest that thousands of devices is large, whereas hundreds is not large. I don’t think it makes much sense. Also remember that we are talking not about all produced phones, but only about who was the first, i.e. Birch vs CE Ubports (or Evergreen vs ??).

Just because a device has a hardware design flaw that does not mean it is not mass-manufactured. Just ask Toyota, Tesla or Volkswagen where 100,000s of cars are regularly pulled back for HW fixes.

The pinephone SoC is from 2016 and besides small fixes I would guess no major changes are to be expected until a Gen2 brings a new architecture.