Librem 5 Evolution

I’ve used the L5 as a daily driver off and on as I’ve weaned services off of my iPhone. In my view, one of the biggest contributions to the platform are the non-Purism contributors (no disrespect to Purism but the value of open source is everyone) Here’s the major wins and limitations in my life and their evolution.

Firefox mobile improvements were greatly upgraded by Emma’s work here.
Epiphany seems to crash less often (possibly anecdotal alone)
Geary Flatpak works well (thanks to zash1958 for sharing that one)

Overall - I have most of what I need: Gnome Authenticator works (migrating from Authy was more awful than it needed to be), Geary works, Firefox works. One of the best parts of the Librem5 is that many times, one doesn’t need to wait for Purism for improvements. There’s lots of updates going out. It seems like once a week, there’s a patch to apply. So there’s work being done. It’s just that we have the power of the community and amazing developers and power users like the one listed above but not alone!

I really, really wish that Signal worked better but that’s a tough one. Signal doesn’t particularly play well with platforms not run by the duopoly we all know and “love”. And since I do use PGP, I also wish I had an email client that works with PGP. Geary doesn’t do that and Evolution doesn’t really have a good mobile mode. It wasn’t designed for that. But even with hits like that, I’m really happy with my L5 and am really close to moving to it near-full time. Signal plays a dominant role in my life so that is a blocking factor to 100% adoption.

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