It depends on your threat model. In principle, you can use them if you don’t run any untrusted code.
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That’s why I will hang on to my vehicles as long as possible, and avoid any “smart” devices as much as possible, I like my devices decentralized like my currency.
That is mostly true (specifically and exclusively for the Intel speculative execution bugs) but I recall that this was even exploitable via Javascript in a browser. So you would either need to
- ensure that, despite the older hardware, you also have a patched (mitigating) browser, or
- your definition of “don’t run any untrusted code” includes “don’t run any Javascript from untrusted web sites” (which in practice for many people would mean: disable Javascript for all web sites possibly except for a small number of whitelisted web sites).
Avoiding running untrusted code is good advice across every computer ever. 
But we digress from an 3-year-old order for a Librem 5 …
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Perhaps I can amuse you with a chart of the order lead times. We are actually back down to “just” 50 months now 
. I expect that number to go down now, as the number of orders in the 2nd half 2018 was way lower than in the 1st.
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Shouldn’t the order dates be up to May-July 2018 now?
Edit: I was referring to this, but maybe it’s not fully confirmed yet. Disregard.
Based on the reply that other user got from Purism it seems late 2018, 2019 and beyond will be later this year or next year for fulfillment.
I talked someone who backed on May 30 and had not yet anything shipped, so no. The last confirmed shipment of a regular L5 seems March 1.
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Will it arrive before 4G is fully deprecated?
Probably yes. Has any country announced plans, with a date, to shut down the 4G network?
In mine there are only “plans with a date” for the shutdown of the 3G network, and still a few years away.
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5G is designed to share spectrum with 4G, so that the carriers won’t have to lose all their investment in 4G when they start adding 5G. I expect 4G to be around for the next decade in urban areas and the next 15 years in rural areas. At this point only half of new phones even have a 5G modem, so we are pretty safe for a while.
Of course I have little hope for VoLTE support on my Linux phones in Bolivia where I live, so I’m hoping that the 3G networks will last another 5 years. Sometimes its good to live in the periphery where new tech arrives late!
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