How mature is the L5?

Hardware Librem 5
22

Perhaps they don’t because they thought it obvious. Limiting AweSIM to just L5 would be plain stupid:

  • Damage to reputation: saying vendor lock-in is bad and practicing it themselves
  • Damage to income: outright banning lots of potential customers and limiting themselves to few of those who get L5 and and want AweSIM with it.

Just does not make any sense.

2 Likes
23

I agree with what you’ve said here. But still, why wouldn’t you have even just one sentence stating it works for any phone? Surely more people would buy the service. Yeah it should be obvious to the tech savvy that there’s no real reason it shouldn’t work. But again, why not say that to draw in more of the consumer market? The way its written, your average smartphone user would probably assume it wouldn’t work on their phone.

3 Likes
24

I’m not sure whether the community will take over or not if Purism disappears. libhandy has already been widely adopted by GTK/GNOME developers, and 58 people have contributed to its code so far, so it will certainly survive. As for the rest of the Phosh mobile environment, I’m not sure after looked at the number of commits to Plasma Mobile, UBports, LuneOS, Maemo Leste and Nemo Mobile in the last year. The only community mobile project that is really working with 100% volunteer labor is Plasma Mobile (and it does have a few paid developers from Blue Systems). Lomiri only had 75 commits in the last year, and still hasn’t completed an upgrade to a newer version of Qt since Canonical abandoned it in May 2017. LuneOS doesn’t appear to be doing much new dev work, and is mostly repackaging the code being released by LG. I doubt that Nemo Mobile’s new Glacier interface will ever be usable for normal users. UBports only has 9 devs registered in its github account and Maemo Leste only has 4 devs working on its code.

The Mobian and postmarketOS devs do contribute to Phosh and I count about a dozen volunteers who have contributed to the Phosh mobile environment (apart from libhandy), but I doubt that they represent more than 3% of the total commits. At this point, Phosh is doing better than the other community mobile projects except Plasma Mobile at attracting outside developers and packagers, so I predict that some people will try to continue Phosh as a 100% volunteer project if Purism dissappears, but I also think it likely that the Mobian and postmarketOS devs who currently contribute would switch their efforts to Plasma Mobile, especially now that Plasma Mobile is adding support for GTK apps and getting rid of libhybris.

It is pretty easy to attract volunteers who will do testing, file bug reports, package in distros, and even develop an app or two, but I don’t think that it will be easy to attract quality volunteers to do new dev work on phoc, phosh, feedbackd, etc. if Purism disappears.

With a year or two more of Purism working on Phosh, it becomes more likely that the larger GNOME community will step forward to take over development if Purism disappears, because at that point, there will probably be over 100 GTK/GNOME applications that have been made adaptive to run on mobile devices, and many of the developers of those applications will start to feel invested in the success of Phosh and start to contribute. Plasma Mobile works because the larger Qt/KDE community now wants their applications to be able to run on mobile devices, and we need the same commitment to happen in the larger GTK/GNOME community.

2 Likes
25

I have used linux here and there over the years and more recently this year started using linux more regularly as I am making moves towards a total privacy wall (ideally). I am still very much a newbie when it comes to a lot of things. I can do most of the basic functions and build an environment and such, but I am no coder. I really don’t know much at all about the other mobile OS’s. I just wanted to preface my experience before this response. I agree with what you’ve said here to the best of my knowledge. The community and software definitely needs to get to a theoretical “tipping point” to where there is enough already developed, and a large enough community to keep the ball rolling so to speak, and get support from bigger organizations. But again, I do not see Purism stopping anytime soon unless they go bankrupt for some reason, or they don’t sell enough Librem devices because it never became widely accepted in mainstream, or by privacy enthusiasts. All of their devices (to my knowledge) are using the same basic OS; Only difference being hardware support/config. Purism absolutely has to support the OS for the company, and products to survive IMO.

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26

I’m encouraged to occasionally see apps in the repos, to my knowledge not built or adapted by Purism, that have a description like “works on Linux phones like the Pinephone or Librem 5,” or something to that effect.

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27

That is good to hear. It helps that there will be a lot of overlap in apps. I don’t think I’d ever be worried about whether or not the apps I want/need not being available. That’s the most prevalent thing the community would work on I think. Biggest worry would be security updates I believe.

4 Likes
28

Evidently it isn’t obvious however. :wink:

And technically not possible?

IMSI, not IMEI.

The IMEI is associated with the phone hardware (the “equipment”). For mainstream phones that means literally with the phone. For the Librem 5 that means associated with the modem card.

Anyone know how to display the IMSI on the Librem 5? I couldn’t find it in Settings.

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29

I don’t think the Settings will have it, but you should be able to find it in your Vodafone account. Or, if you still have the plastic card your SIM card came from originally.

30

There’s a difference between the IMSI and ICCID. The former identifies the subscriber. The latter identifies the SIM card. The former is 14 or 15 digits. The latter is 20 to 22 digits, starting with 89.

The ICCID can be found under the sim-id in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections in the appropriate .nmconnection file.

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31

Some SIM card kits show both.
Edit: If I recall.
Did you check your online account with Vodafone?

32

Oh, I’m sure I could get the info from either the provider (Vodafone) or the paper detritus that came with the SIM many years ago. I was just curious about getting it via a GUI or CLI on the phone.

Anyways, answering my own question: mmcli --sim=0
gives the IMSI (as well as the ICCID, and some other info).

5 Likes
33

Nice! Thanks for sharing that command.

34

My apologies. Not extremely versed in SIM knowledge.

35

I need to add: The modem index and SIM index are not fixed. So the full correct way to get this info is

mmcli -L

to list the modems. For example, gives: /org/freedesktop/ModemManager1/Modem/1

So the modem index to use at this moment in time is ‘1’.

So

mmcli -m 1

You can check, in passing, your own phone number (| grep own:) and get the SIM index (| grep SIM)

The output for the SIM index looks like:
SIM | dbus path: /org/freedesktop/ModemManager1/SIM/1

So the SIM index is 1.

So finally

mmcli -i 1

-i and -m are abbreviated forms of --sim and --modem respectively.

4 Likes