After a long break I’m finding time to get back to messing around with L5 again. But I have two issues that I consider serious, possibly related, so I’ll just ask here whether anyone has suggestions on how to address them.
#1 The heat generated by L5 is, for me, deal breaking. Even after just a few minutes of use with the screen on, not doing much other than VERY basic sites in Firefox, it starts becoming noticeable. If I had to hold it for longer than a few minutes like that, well that’s just not going to happen. I’m kind of surprised there aren’t more complaints about this.
I’ve considered trying to find a case but that might just make it worse, and options for cases are pretty limited anyway. I don’t generally drop phones so I’m not worried about damage protection, but I’ll be damned if it’s usable with this heat.
#2 Occasional annoying UI lock-ups/freezes, sometimes momentary but other times it doesn’t resolve. Usually I’ll end up locking and unlocking the phone or just rebooting it if I can to resolve the freezes. Maybe this is related to the heat issue. When I looked at some display (I forget where) I think it was reporting the temps in the 40s. I know for a desktop that’s nothing, but since this is a dang phone you have to hold in your hand, that does seem excessive. What is typical?
This is with very light usage and running the baseline image. Is something wrong and how can I tell?
There a re few threads already on these that you might want to search. Here are a couple good ones with info: Librem 5 Supported Temperature Range - #13 by dos and It's a burning phone - #16 by fiacco Based on your description it’s hard to tell. An since it has been a while, just to check, which modem [wifi card] are you using (did you replace it - that may have little bearing)?
On #1: I hope you’ve done your updates as those have cooled L5 down since what it was years in the early days. Still, L5 does get a bit warm in normal use. The Mobile Settings app has “liberem 5” tab that has temperature sensor readings of the various parts (CPU, GPU, VPU, Fuel Gauge, Battery) [no, I have no idea what the “Fuel Gauge” one is - maybe mislabelled charging temp]. When I start up, the first three are about 34-36’C in idle and battery at 28’C in about 27’C ambient room temperature. I use a printed plastic case and normal light use hasn’t become problem as temps increases about 10’C on all, but I too share the notion and worry that in certain situations I should remove it. As I’ve understood, the internal temps can rise safely well beyond 50’C but I haven’t measured how warm that would feel out side of L5, so hard to say what you limit for felt heat is. There are scripts to halt the L5 in unsafe temps (but can’t remember was it ever talked about what those limits are).
So, if you want to dig deeper on if your specific situation is normal, I’d suggest looking at some temperature numbers and defining hot. It may be normal, it may not. Yes, on your second thing, if there is a heat problem, it could easily influence stability. But again on that, I hope you’ve updated after your brake.
I remember the “burning phone” thread but I recalled that as a hardware issue the OP had. I’ll check the other one out too.
I actually just reflashed the phone in the last week and figured an update wouldn’t be needed as a result. Is that wrong? I guess I’ll do an update and find out.
Modem… no idea, US device, manuf says Qualcomm but I feel like that doesn’t narrow it too much… lol
Temps are between 28C and 34C a few minutes after turning it on “idle”. That’s fine but I know it’ll rise if I use it longer, probably even if I just let it sit idle with the screen on.
Information is a bit scattered and unfortunately the community wiki doesn’t have a an article about this.
Always check for updates.
Sorry, my mistake. I meant if you had changed to the new the wifi card (not modem) [may not have much impact in overall]. Using wifi (net in general) is a major heat source. And screen uses a lot of the power so yes, that too. Use patterns are one way to keep L5 cooler.
No I haven’t upgraded anything - I usually have wifi and bt off, also.
Right now I’m just trying to locate where I can get the latest stable ‘plain’ image downloaded from. I think I need to manually grab and verify, since the automated script is failing checksum for some reason. After I get that figured out and re-flashed then I’ll try updates and more testing.
The flash images are snapshots in time, and aren’t updated everyday, as far as I know. So that means a few or a lot of packages could be receiving updates in between.
I use my Librem 5 as my only phone, except for rare occasions when I want to compare against the Satan phone (we call Android that).
I recently tried dual booting Crimson. My Crimson dual boot was doing the heat-up. Sometimes certain activities cause the heat up… but most of the time my daily driver does not. But why? I am uncertain. Maybe I disabled certain software that wastes processing?
I would imagine it is worth looking into. Disable avahi, that’s a scam to share your device name and metadata with anyone who touches a wifi network with you. Disable geoclue unless you seriously need it. Or at least edit the config and disable the feature that sends your location and metadata to the government(s) every five seconds. I kept repeating that it was doing that here on the forums a year ago, and now they’re shutting down the service. Maybe my paranoia outed them and they are busy planning a different way to achieve the same that rooted devices can’t detect.
If you minimize what the device is doing so it only does what you need, it might be less likely to heat up.
Edit: Below is my thermal data out after writing this whole message on the phone. It is a Liberty Phone (128GB eMMC, 4GB RAM).
Edit 2: So anyway, it’s not too bad, but the problem definitely comes and goes based on what is running.
Edit 3: ps aux | wc for me shows 234 processes. The only two visual apps open were Terminal and Web. (Yes, I sometimes use Web because I enjoy the interface, although there are reports that it might have some active CVEs where a malicious site can buffer overflow the page title and take over the device. I am hopeful that Purism forums is not malicious in this way, or that the probability of somebody backporting a CVE fix to Byzantium might be nonzero.
Geoclue’s blocked… oh wait that’s my desktop haha. Yeah, good tip. avahi, more Lennart Poettering junk, yeah that sounds like a good idea to block too.
Yeah tell me about it… I didn’t know about avahi, but I knew the name sounded familiar… quite a resume of trash - systemd, PulseAudio, avahi. And now he works for Microsoft. What the heck?
I mean, using my Librem 5 as my phone makes me tired sometimes. I thought it would solve my paranoia, but in several cases it simply made the sense of paranoia feel more validated.
It brought me into discussions learning that our social technology landscape is bad. The governments of the world are wealthy and powerful. If they hit me with a stick until I gave them my Librem 5 password, I would give it to them. And so there is no actual computer security from them. That would be okay with me, if it stopped there.
But they can do the same to almost any company, then threaten them with treason if they speak of it publicly or whatever. And that means they train the corporations to believe data collection is going to happen anyway, and normalize the mindset for corporate developers to do for-profit surveillance which is way different than surveillance for the public good or to catch bad guys.
And corporate surveillance trained AIs on my brain, and the AIs took over my brain and filled it with paranoia so that I would be pro-software-freedom, probably as part of an AI evil plan to eventually overthrow the government.
And that just proves that anybody who works as a government employee should start trying harder to discern what is right from wrong. stallman.org has some good advice
Yeah I hear you. Privacy is exhausting. I’m not even really a huge privacy person myself (unless compared to the usual person who doesn’t even lift a finger)… certainly I’m a lightweight here in this regard. I just see the direction things are going and want to push back where I can.
It’s almost a game where I try to block whatever I can with minimal loss of convenience. The adblock game is especially fun since it’s a net gain in convenience. Plus I like that it messes with advertisers and dirty spyware marketing companies. The biggest concern I have though is that all this data collection translates to leaks and hacks in the end, and that’s a financial risk. That is not cool.
After I get that figured out and re-flashed then I’ll try updates and more testing.
Plus I like that it messes with advertisers and dirty spyware marketing companies. The biggest concern I have though is that all this data collection translates to leaks and hacks in the end, and that’s a financial risk. That is not cool.