Librem 5 — painpoint assessment 2021

MMS is enabled in chatty 5.0~beta3, which is the latest version.

There has been a fair bit of work on suspend lately:

The slow charging is because the L5’s battery charging is currently limited to 5V x 1.6A, but I’m still hoping for future 9V or 12V charging. See my comments: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/comparing-l5-and-pp/#charging

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The two go together as well i.e. people would be more prepared to accept slow charging if the phone only had to be charged once a week.

To be honest though I don’t have a problem with the time to charge. It is only the time between charges (about 8 to 9 hours) that bugs me.

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I haven’t tried MMS on chatty in quite awhile, you are saying it actually works now?

Chris Talbot (kop316) who wrote the code to support MMS says that it works in chatty 5.0~beta3, so its worth upgrading and trying it. It hasn’t yet been added to Mobian, so I haven’t tried it.

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thats good news, not sure I will trust to try the beta version and wait for it in the official PureOS app store. I already burned one SIM card experimenting with things, so I can wait on it, but that is a huge feature I need for a daily driver. Even if I don’t see a message on suspend, as long as it works when I check my phone, I can deal with it.

Chatty 0.5.0-beta3 is already in the official PureOS store, so no need for waiting :slight_smile:

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I added something about the current MMS situation in another thread: State of MMS on Librem 5

TL;DR: MMS works now, but annoyingly creates a group chat, possibly due to missing info about own number.

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good news, I will be trying that out. Now if only the battery life and the forever charging was slightly improved. I realize the camera will probably never be that good, but just hope it is serviceable one day, like a Blackberry camera, not an iPhone camera, but as of now, its darker than the earliest camera phones from like the mid 00’s.

Have you increased the gain setting? I agree it’s nowhere near an iPhone camera, but substantially increasing the gain setting allowed me to get a reasonably decent photo even in its current state.

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It’s annoying that when the camera app is launched, the gain is always reset to it’s lowest possible value rather than its last value. If nothing else, it seems to me, that for the best user experience, the sensor’s gain should be initialized to its last value (or its maximum value rather than its minimum value, if the last value cannot be saved).

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Absolutely. There is a LOT of improvement needed for the camera to be usable for normal smartphone use.

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Glad to see this, although personally I will miss the mobile, wifi, and battery icons that currently display under the time on the lock screen. @guido.gunther

But since those are now kept visible in the notifications area, that’s cool.

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Sadly, I wanted the actual battery percentage. The icons are relatively imprecise and of necessity rather small, better than nothing, but not what I was after.

If an actual percentage is not to be available then using colour to augment the icon would be helpful, although I understand that that is not a fully “accessible” design e.g. 0-19 red; 20-79 white; 80-100 green.

Ah, but in byzantium, you can now select “Show Battery Percentage” in the Power settings.


Time to upgrade, IW! :slight_smile:

Yes, I agree. It is becoming a problem. (In my defence, I’ve had other more serious and more pressing IT problems to deal with - and as a longer-time Librem 5 user, I have more to lose / more time needed than most from having to reflash. So it’s a double whammy.)

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My manjaro pinephone just updated its phosh and the battery percentage on the lockscreen is a breath of fresh air.

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I recently reflashed from amber and was putting it off for a few months before doing so. I anticipated both a lengthy process and numerous issues along the way, but found neither.

I highly recommend using Angus’s update branch for the flash script described in this post. Successful Reflash to Byzantium

That branch takes care of two things.

  1. Updates the default encryption key for the luke partition.
  2. Resized the encrypted partition to the whole drive.

After flashing, restore your files, restart and enjoy what almost feels like a new device.

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For me, it’s more about the extensive ‘configuration’ that I have done, all of which will have to be redone.

Also

One thing I am wondering about is whether you get LUKS1 or LUKS2 as the end result. I think one really wants the latter but I have read in this forum (in other words, anecdotally) that you get the former.

So I would prefer to wait until that is ‘fixed’, if indeed there is something to fix.

Edit: @Kyle_Rankin can you shed light on what is the actual current situation?

Related discussion: Librem 5 - Unlock LUKS volume with a FIDO2 device

Is net data a premium in your part of the world? I’m wondering why you wouldn’t download an image and check for yourself. Then you’d have a first hand definitive answer rather than being dependent on others or any form of anecdotal murmuring.

Anyway, see image below, this is a header dump of the LUKS container from a LUKS variant Byzantium image, this is the (at time of writing) latest build…

If you’re holding out for these images to be available as LUKS2, you might be waiting for some time. It is possible to regenerate these images with a full LUKS2 container in fairly short time so I don’t think it’s worth holding out for Purism to provide LUKS2 directly. Depending on your machine specs, my one year laptop with NVME drive will create a LUKS2 variant from the original LUKS1 in around a minute, my very old entry level dual core machine with spinning rust will do it in around 12 minutes. It’s a relatively painless process.

I would still do the re-encryption before flashing to the phone, re-encrypting the live disk on the phone is not a problem but i can take some time (re-encrypting the container before expanding it is not too bad at just over 2 minutes, if you leave it until after expanding to fill the disk it’s a little over 16 minutes (assuming the phone is not doing anything else at the same time) re-encrypting on a desktop prior to flashing is around 17 seconds for me).

Data (quota) isn’t - but bandwidth is (in my very specific part of the world). So, no, I would not spend the time on a GB download just to get a one-bit answer that someone else already has.

… for whether Purism plans to change this, and if so when, can only come from Purism.

Lots of things are possible if you know how.

I’m not worried about how many minutes it takes to regenerate (12 minutes - 60 minutes - overnight is fine). I am more worried about the number of minutes of my time spent in this loop

{
* regenerate
* flash
* boot
* oh dear 😁
}
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