I found the most critical thing being call audio. Often (in about 50% of calls, less if I’m lucky that day) either the other party can’t hear me, I can’t hear them, or both. Usually from the beginning of the call, or during a random point in the call. I think it’s a modem issue as if I stand completely still in one spot and the call initiates successfully (audio I mean) it can do even a long call without problems, but if I move around it usually results in immediate audio loss (that doesn’t come back until making a new call). I think it’s related to cell signal level or even switching between base stations. The modem is BM818 for EU. I wrote a mail to support about the audio issue but after saying to check the pulseaudio version they didn’t reply back so I think they don’t know either.
Other things are bad too, like the camera is almost unusable, there’s no USB MTP or mass storage so I have to copy files over ssh or turn off the phone and swap the SD card. Lack of mobile-adapted apps isn’t really Purism’s fault but that’s a big issue too. The battery not lasting long is something I could live with if the other basic features of the phone worked. It lasts longer if you kill all apps, especially browsers like Firefox and Web which I’ve found use a lot of power even just idling.
Maybe that is because not everybody has an unstable working phone.
With this having said, I’m not stating that this is the case for everybody.
Merely trying to explain the different experiences ppl have with the L5.
I’m lucky, my L5 basics (calls and SMS) work fine. The ‘enhanced’ features need more attention, but so far I accept that there are limmitations.
As long as the phone is not in suspend mode the reliability is not good but useable
But without suspend the battery is faster empty as You can look.
And the ear will be “grilled” on every call > 2 minutes.
And calls from 10 minutes or so sometimes take 30-40% of batterys load
This must clearly work WAY better
Like I said, not everybody has the same (bad) experience with the L5.
Would be interesting if all the users without problems do not use Suspend?
I beleive I receive all calls and sms’s at the moment, and I always have suspend. This was not the case earlier
do you have an update on using wayland protocol + acran.
could you pls share your experience!
Easy question, easy answer: They need new products to get the money they need to develop software. And Purism was always a hardware company with a bit of software development. Nothing has changed so far.
My opinion is, that they focused on software development the past few years and payed more than they could to bring L5 to an usable state. The other way around would be to update L5 slower, but without interruption. But that would also mean to have L5 some month later to a usable state.
So now they focus on the next piece of hardware and OS development begins after this phase again. At least it’s what a dev said about the situation.
This has 2 main issues right now: The software development stop was at a very stupid point. Just a little bit more and we would have Crimson plus all the community driven updates (like Phosh 0.37, days away from 0.38 or all the GNOME software stack). Purism would have the time for hardware and the “Crimson mimimi” wouldn’t exist (I do also mimimi 
).
There is also no pro active transparency on that software development stop, that’s the second issue. How often community told Purism to be more transparent since it’s a very special project? How often did they ignore it? And if they made some transparency, community was in a much nicer mood and supported Purism a bit more - but Purism did not learn about it. We had to mimimi again until a nice developer (and therefor no official announcement) told us what’s going on. It would be nice to have such posts as blog post on homepage.
But I don’t think software development is dead … it’s just sleeping a bit.
Donation was always an option, even before people had a device in hands and while they still developed software. It was never a replacement and should never end as such. It just should speed up things. And the forums thread about donation for Crimson is another topic. Community driven to speed up things a bit. But that would also not replace the company driven development. It just would be to push PureOS over the last meter to get access to other updates.
This is a marketing speech about “if we fail, source is available, community has the power to provide more updates until nobody is using this device anymore”. They never said, they will provide life time updates. But I’m sure that’s nothing about the current situation.
I guess you had an earlier version? I got mine on early summer last year with everything up to date. Even apt update said “no updates” (but next day there were some). It’s no issue every customer has/had.
Your issue 1: Sounds like an outdated firmware or older modem. Search in forums, there are some explanations. If I understand you correctly, you want to use L5 again, as soon as it gets new updates, so it’s worse solving this issue.
I may got you wrong (answering while reading post step by step) and a bit later you wrote it’s about touch responsive? In past I had this issue, too. In last time not, but not sure if I’m just lucky or the issue is fixed.
Edit:
I used suspend a lot without calling issues. My battery also does not go down 30-40% in 10 min (sometimes calling 30min and still have a lot of power). Are you sure that everything is up to date for you? Your issue doesn’t sound normal to me.
Thanks for replying @Ick I appreciate your insight and perspective. And to reply to your points:
I totally get the need for donations to keep FOSS going. And I saw prior to L5s being delivered Purism set up a page about donations and the highest donations for a particular piece of software would be worked on. That’s fine. I donated money back then, and I don’t money to the develops of my laptop distro yearly.
My issue, and the point I was trying to make with the need for 'having to pay more money now to help software development" is because from I can tell, some of those comments in the Crimson thread appear to be coming from Purism staff, which if true, implies, at least to my way of thinking, that the company won’t develop Crimson until we, the users pay more money. I tried to find the quote, without success, which said something along the lines of we 'now have to either buy more Purism products to get software updates" or something along those lines. And, to me, that is not right when there is nothing about paying for software on Purism’s website. As I said in my initial post if that was stated on the sight, no problem, because then everyone knows that.
Yes, And, that is misleading, because non Linux users who have an interest in getting out of the Google and Apple tracking issues out there who have either come across the site on their own, or who have been recommended by Purism users would potentially think Purism will develop the software for years and years, because that’s what implied on their website.
My point here, (and yes, I was told to reflash by the staff member, but after asking here in the forum I quickly discovered I didn’t need to as my initial issue was sorted quickly), is, the quick ‘fix’ for most issues seem to be, “You need to reflash”, which again either, comes down to defective hardware supplied by Purism (they should have done quality control when building the devices before sending them out), or outdated software (maintained in the PureOS repo by Purism developers) or operating system (again developed by Purism)
Absolutely. As I said, I love the concept of the L5, and once everything (being able to use the device as a basic phone with decent battery life) I will.
Edit: @Ick you said:
Here is a direct quote from the L5 website, Purism– Librem 5 :
Lifetime updates that actually extend your phone’s life
When you purchase a Librem 5, you can be confident that we will continue to provide security updates, privacy improvements, bug fixes, and new features… for the lifetime of your device, without compromising performance. Your Librem will stay secure and responsive for years to come.Like a good wine, it will probably get better over time, not worse.
I know that comment and here it is. I quote:
In other words they need to invest money to make more money and that’s the reason for temporary development stop of the software stack. As soon as they release this new hardware they will have a new money source where parts of it will go into software development.
If you ask me, we should wait until a new product is released. From this point we need to give a little bit more time to make some sells and to start software development (before we get the first update they need to work on software). I recommend to wait for this point before thinking something else about.
As I said before, Purism’s communication is a huge issue.
Or outdated firmware (that only can be installed manually - which is just recommended if you have issues).
When you purchase a Librem 5, you can be confident that we will continue to provide security updates, privacy improvements, bug fixes, and new features… for the lifetime of your device, without compromising performance.
Misleading, but true. Interpret “we” as “we software devs, including people of the whole developing community” (something they communicated earlier in other blog posts). Even now we get some security updates (not done by Purism I guess) and we also could use another OS and still can update our device. The marketing points to the difference to Android or iOS, where a single entity (company) decides about software support. On Android there are to points of failure (Google and the hardware company that provides software side hardware support / drivers).
I don’t say it’s fine how they advertise this. (I would not act like this). It’s just an explanation.
In additional what I wrote above. Software development is not entirely stopped, just paused. And think about my previous post where I told that it’s more a question how much money they put into software at what time ((1) all the time little or (2) first a lot and later none (current point) and after this again a lot etc). Just my opinion.
I use suspend and I don’t have many issues besides the kernel issue
My L5 is on absolutely latest releases and also the modem version was checked by support. It is also the newest available release
I see, it really sounds hardware related to me (but I’m no expert).
This is software related, on Mobian this problems are gone and new problems arises
Do you use vpn? do you have any issue with vpn on restore from suspend? that is my only problem with suspend.
what is the kernel issue?
Same here. I will wait for Crimson and test it out when it comes out but if the experience doesn’t improve I’m going to buy Fairphone 5 with /eOS. I had L5 for 3 years now and very little has changed. There are simply too many problems to ignore and the devs will outright said they will not bother fixing some of those problems because they don’t feel it’s important.
Can you tell me what problems they don’t mind to fix (at least of those which are important to you)?
Phone numbers saved in Sim card do not show up in Contacts application on L5. Purism is not planning on implementing this function. And then MTP is also not being worked on. So I cannot transfer any files between the phone and PC when I plug it in with USB cable.
There are a lot of ways to transfer data between pocket-PC and PC. SSH, KDE Connect, some internet solutions like Matrix or Onion Share etc.
Via USB SSH would be the solution. For people with less tech background KDE Connect (transfering data through home network … for example L5->W-Lan->Modem->Ethernet->PC) works between all systems (Linux, Windows, Android, iOS) with few UI-clicks (need to be installed on all systems).