I’m using my L5 as a daily driver over a year now, and I am pleased using it.
There are several things that I still miss, but basic functions like making a phone call and texting are OK (speaking for my own experience).
I’m convinced that the progress will continue and many of us will be made happy using the L5 as daily driver. 
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Thank you for giving us your MO. It helps us understand where you are coming from.
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How does this have only 15 likes? I just made it 16.
@intergalacticllama you’re an inspiration, and I appreciate hearing of your successful switch to the Librem 5.
I can only wish I had the skills and knowhow to fly mine as you do - although the nature of my work is such that to be able to daily it in my professional sphere is going to to take a while.
The big hurdle for me is that text messages are still unreliable at best on 3G, and almost completely non-functional on 4G. Once that is fixed, I can start finding ways of making it work for our use case.
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Sounds like you may need to update your modem firmware.
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This is a great thread. Thanks!
My wife and I don’t have cell phones because they all require non-free software. I’ve wanted to get a Librem 5 but wanted to wait until it was production ready. I use Linux exclusively (Librem 14, PureOS) for my computing needs, but I still want something that “just works.”
Would it be possible to get one Librem 5 and share it with my wife? So, we each have a user account onthe phone, and we each get our own SIM cards with our own numbers, and then we switch SIMs? Is it easy to switch SIMs on this phone? Is this a reasonable ask?
I see the Librem SIMple would be better for us, since we don’t need data. These would just be emergency phones for the most part. Would it be cheaper or better to get prepaid SIMs? Would they work on this phone? Do I get them at Walmart? Dumb questions, I know, but I’ve been out of the phone loop for over a decade.
Also, it looks like the Librem 5 has GPS. Does this mean I’d be able to use it for navigation when driving? That’s always been one of the biggest appeals to me of a smart device, being able to use GPS plus maps for real time navigation. Can I do that with the Librem 5?
Thanks for the help!
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A comment and a half answer:
- I want to commend you and your wife on your principled stand. I have been exploring the idea of “why” it is difficult for people to stand on principle and simply go along with the crowd. I had a conversation the other day that makes me think that it isn’t lack of principle but something closer to “I don’t see an end in sight so what is the point” sort of thing, implying that it might be possible to convince more people to stand on principle with the right communication.
However, it is incredibly rare to see couples stand unified on principle and THAT is truly inspiring.
- The answer to your question about two user using the phone is “TECHNICALLY yes, the phone software can handle multiple accounts and you would only need to switch sims and you would be able to make phone calls from your own isolate environments”. The system wide phone settings would be shared but you would have your own private files just like a computer.
However, here is the BUT.
I don’t believe (I have not checked, maybe someone knows) Phosh needs to be aware of multiple user sessions and allow for different passwords to log into individual sessions. Coding this up might not be too difficult but I don’t believe it exists.
In order to achieve something like this, you would need to install a regular desktop environment + a login manager such as lightdm that does this (thread: Multiple DE with selection at login screen) and from the desktop you should be able to start the phone + text apps and go. However, because it would be normal desktop you would lose call / messaging integration so you wouldn’t get notification when a call text comes in, you would have to manually setup screen rotation and so on. I am not aware of any competitor to Phosh that is designed to be used as a phone so that may be the only way to do that.
If you aren’t technical, I would strongly recommend against going down this route because in order to set this up correctly you need to do a few things: learn a whole bunch of new sysadmin skills, maybe learn to code a bit, spend a whole lot of time to make everything work for you and on top of that you might have to settle for a lesser user experience because writing your own equivalent to Phosh is a lot of work even if you could glue together a bunch of software to mimic what it does.
- Recommendation - If you are sure you would want a Librem 5 (it sounds like it might meet your needs as they match mine) I would buy one and try it and see for your self. If it works buy a second one for your wife. Or wait until a new version of Phosh supports multiple accounts and maybe a new device supports dual sim.
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I would be curious if you manage to resolve this issue like fslover mentioned. I have not had to deal with this issue so maybe I lucked out. Have you contacted support? I have read about flashing the firmware manually, but, I thought the software store / manager did this for you.
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Can confirm the software store does not flash firmware and the modem firmware is only available from Purism support at this time and they do not want to release the firmware nor the process outside of contacting support at this time.
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Excellent response! Thank you!
Does L5 support GPS and maps for real time navigation, like while driving?
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I would say, generally, no. It is fiddly and some customers have messed this up. So this probably wouldn’t be the recommended course of action.
As to whether it is production ready, it’s important to remember that the Librem 5 is a general purpose computer and therefore can do so many things, potentially, but most of them won’t be important to you. So it is necessary to identify what your hard requirements are and what your “nice to haves” are.
The Librem 5 does not operate like that out-of-the-box. That is not the current design focus. I’m sure it can be made to do so. For someone who “uses Linux exclusively”, I expect that you would be able to work through the issues but you would be making life a little more difficult for yourself.
(My personal opinion is that I would like to see this standard Linux functionality re-instated as an easy GUI setting that just works - as a future low-priority change.)
Bear in mind that the Librem phone plans are only available for customers in the US (but your mention of “Walmart” suggests that you may indeed be in the US). These plans are comparatively expensive for a phone that is basically just for “emergencies”.
An existing SIM should in general just work if moved across to the Librem 5. Trying to activate a new SIM in the Librem 5 could be a problem if you have one of these authoritarian mobile phone service providers that tries to restrict what phone you can use. So I would recommend that you do your searching first - what networks / providers are available in your area and what has been the experience of Librem 5 customers in your country with that network / provider.
For an emergency phone, you are probably better off to have a single shared phone number and the default shared user account on the phone (purism). Yes, that will be more painful if you upgrade to a phone each in the future - but at least you won’t have some authoritarian mobile phone environment (Apple or Google) telling you what you can and can’t do as far as splitting the content of the phone.
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Thank you for this!
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Purism sort of disagrees with you:
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I think @irvinewade was referring to the process of swapping SIMs being mechanically fiddly. (It is a fact that a number of people have posted that they had trouble with it.)
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Phosh on the Librem 11 handles multiple users. The L11 runs Crimson, but I don’t know why Byzantium wouldn’t.
I used the useradd command. I don’t know whether there is a GUI for doing it on a phone.
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You are correct that exchanging personas would be a different approach, rather than having two accounts on the phone. It is an option for the poster to consider, particularly given that he is already talking about swapping SIMs anyway. I would still rather just have the login screen reinstated (for those that want it).
For clarity, the quoted post is talking about changing the µSD card (not the SIM), the author isn’t around any more to elaborate, and it isn’t clear how much actual changing of the µSD card he was doing - since the purpose of his post was to demonstrate that it was possible to move the “persona” to the µSD card, and hence make personas in theory exchangeable. (You can move the persona to the µSD card but still just leave the card permanently in place, which may free up space on the eMMC drive.)
I always took his (example) use case as being … you are intending to travel outside your own country, you first remove your real persona before leaving your country, you insert a vanilla persona - which would not usually necessitate frequent changes (e.g. not daily changes). That reflects a threat model, but the poster isn’t really concerned about that threat, hence why I would favour a software solution for the poster.
To elaborate on my post:
- Some customers have fried their SIM card by failing to shut down the phone before swapping SIMs. (That by itself is an inconvenience if your “daily” use case involves deciding whether Mr or Mrs Grey is going to have the phone that day and inserting the correct SIM and potentially the correct µSD card.)
- Some customers have managed to get one or both cards in the tray to jam in such a way that it is quite difficult / almost impossible to get the tray out (and hence quite difficult / almost impossible to exchange those two cards at all - which would be a style-cramper for your day).
- And, yeah, it’s just a bit fiddly.
I wish Purism had put all three cards behind the battery (and hence done away with the tray altogether).
@elkingrey should take all this into account if contemplating this as a daily use case.
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My recollection … there’s somewhere where purism is, or was, hard-coded. So as a one-off change (i.e. you don’t want to use the default, purism, user at all, which is a better security choice), it is easy enough to fix - but as a daily process, a bit painful.
Me too.
My understanding: There is but it is not adaptive (yet) and hence doesn’t work (unless you temporarily dock / use an external monitor).
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It would be a really interesting feature for a future version to have dual or triple sims and assign a sim to a profile. Probably will never happen but, it would allow people to have personal / business profiles and swap between then as necessary. I assume a modem can only use one sim at a time so there would be no need to deal with dynamic profile switching for incoming calls for different profiles.
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eSIMs make it easier to support 2 or 3 (or more) SIMs.
I don’t have any direct experience on a mobile phone with 2 or more SIMs but I think this might not be correct.
For the specific requirement of the poster, having the 2 SIMs physically or virtually in there but only one of them actually in use may be adequate. For many customers that would not be sufficient, particularly for outbound calls.
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