First of all, great work, Purism, staff, and volunteers, on the Librem 5. Super cool device. There are so many things that work great. The convergence is a game-changer.
However, we all know there are “bugs”. Things just do not work to the level, in my humble opinion, of what most Android or Iphone users would “expect” from a mobile device. The question then is, why? I believe a wish list is in order:
(This is my list. Totally subjective. Feel free to add your own).
Fix the Bluetooth issues. I would really like to use ALL of my Bluetooth speakers and my car. Sure, some things work. A lot do not. My car does not.
The modem switching off. This is really irritating. My wifi and cellular connections crash fairly often or just don’t work. I really should not have to keep manually resetting it.
VoLTE. I know, it is being worked on.
Suspend. Get it to where I don’t have problems on wake-up, etc. It also lacks functionality, it randomly shuts things off even though I am using audio, for example. Don’t turn off my podcast please. I am listening to it. Recognize that, please.
Maps/location services. This is just plain bad. (I like Pure Maps and Gnome-Maps. Let’s just get them to work!)
Camera. I know things are being done. I am excited. Still, it isn’t great. I would really like to use my phone for video and signal/discord, etc.
A case! Make this easy. I need a case. I am tired of trying to “find” a good case.
Not at all a must but, try to integrate Waydriod/Anbox. I am sorry but the world thinks Android and Iphone apps run the world and certain things just do not work now for me. I won’t list all the annoyances. I want to avoid Android/Iphone, I get it. There are trade-offs, but this seems reasonable to me.
Battery. Small gripe here. It could be a lot better. It has gotten a lot better.
Copy/paste text. This is too hard. I keep trying to add text to various websites, etc and cutting and pasting is annoying.
Logging-in. Why do I have to type my password three times to log-in? This seems easily fixable. Please fix.
Ok. This is about it for me. Again, super cool device. I use it as a daily driver. I am very pleased with the continued updates. Thanks so much for all efforts. I will continue to support this financially because I believe in it and I am impressed without the amount of effort thus far.
There are a lot of impressive people working on this phone and I am excited about the future. I thank you.
Purism is working to improve the BT, but some part is hard to fix. Also consider that for some reason the L5 will not work 100% like other Apple, Google, Samsung.
There are a hard bug on kernel causing the modem crash or hangs, Purism already is tracking this bug for long time, Pinephone and Pro has same bug, but they fixed with dirty hack. Upgrading the U-Boot to v2022.10 help a little.
Recently if you listen audio the L5 do not go for supend, consider upgrade u-boot+userland.
A big update for GNSS fixes is coming, no worries.
Camera is working and the others features will fall on LTS, some features it not really depend for Purism but for backend. Also please consider do not find too much missing/lack things for L5 i mean the L5 is not Samsung, Apple, Google, Intel, Guru.
I Absolute agree with you, we need a cool case ASAP.
Purism will cool fix this behaviour, just wait. Well it ready if you want to do it manually.
Yeah, thats annoying. A workaround is marking a text (blue) and then change to the terminal keyboard (via “globus” key). Then a CTRL+C and CTRL+V often works
squeekboard has come a long way but still occasionally or at least every day scales incorrectly and becomes a slightly smaller version, happens in landscape and portrait, the keyboard is KEY - no pun intended.
VoLTE was my number one concern going forward. Luckily it was solved this last month with firmware updates. If you don’t have it you can open up a support case with support@puri.sm. They will send over instructions. They got me fixed up, just downloaded the items, ran said items in terminal to update stuff, and switched it to 4G Only mode to test (Not necessary, just my preference.) They are going to make a simpler way to update it with future releases I believe.
Not fixed on Pinephone in my experience. It was always annoying, but I now know that it was worse than I thought. The Pinephone modem died on me about a week ago. Pinephone mainboards are out of stock (modem is soldered), so I moved my SIM to a burnerdroid and have been using the wifi hotspot to stream during my commute. I now have only two tiny deadzones and almost no dropouts. It was the shakey modem all along!
I ordered my L5 on 21Jan 2019, so I should be able to ditch the crippled Pinephone and burnerdroid very soon.
