Librem5 Review: At rest in my desk drawer?

Hardware Librem 5
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My review as an early Librem5 adopter, patient user and backer of the “Fund your apps-campaign”. I own my Librem 5 since March 2021 now. To cope with my jobs and daily needs I had to buy several budget phones in the meantime, always hoping that I don’t need them for long, as the Librem 5 app environment ‘matures’.

But my expectations were largely disappointed since the last one and a half year. And here are reasons why:

  • The battery drain is still much too high. When I use the Librem5 as I commonly use my mobile device and I’m not a heavy user, it takes a half work day until the battery is discharged.

  • The phone function is not (!) reliable. The modem dies unexpectedly. Not during calls but some-when in between. People cannot call me! Don’t know why and when.

  • I need a fast, reliable, well arranged calendar for my work. But it takes about 20 seconds to load my calendars via wlan (!) … nextcloud-calendars, professionally hosted. And after it’s loaded, it’s mostly useless. There are three calendars I have to keep in track, which is normal for professionals. But no chance with the Librem5: There is still no appropriate day view function in the calendar. The week view gives no information at all, just vertical bars with scattered words or only letters on it. The year view is good for nothing! I have found a workaround by using the month view, but as the calendar is not really adaptive I very often cannot read the time of events which is … not helpful. Sitting in meetings and trying to schedule appointments is so tortuous. I have solved this by using the paper-pencil method during the meetings or typing with my Thinkpad and as the sync works, I can later more or less read it on the Librem5.

  • The camera function? Useless: Dark display, distorted colour scheme. Useless!

  • The PureOS Store: The number of adaptive productivity apps (section ‘Work’ and ‘Socialize’) is not considerably growing.

  • Messengers… Hey, you offer a phone without a commonly used messenger. SMS? Is that the state of the art? Matrix? Matrix is cool, but who uses Matrix? Maybe in the future, maybe not? Why does Purism care so little about a native Signal-client?

  • Navigation? Nope! Maps or Pure Maps: Crap! Why does ‘Pure maps’ think that I’m in the centre of Berlin, East Germany right now? The same for ‘Maps’. It locates me in Berlins Neptun fountain. although I am in the northwest of Germany.

  • Files: How can I change into a subfolder? Single ‘click’, ‘double click‘ ? None of them works. Useless app.

  • Why is the access to web pages so horribly slow? Again and again the inbuilt “Gnome-Web-Browser“ (40.2) says: “Oops! There may be a problem!” while using our fibre-optic-internet access via wlan. Firefox does load the pages and is much faster. I could say that I don’t care about “Gnome-Web Browser”, but your “Install Site as Web Application” function is only built into the preinstalled Web Browser.

  • Why does it take sooooo long to load the folders in the PureOS-Store? I’m still in our wlan.

I have bought a 120 Euro Android phone to resume my social contacts and to handle my daily schedule.

So frustrating. Please care about the essential software, boost your “Fund-your-app-campaign” or what-so-ever. No freaky apps or functions, just the core, as rated during your “Fund-your-app-survey”.

Best E.

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So frustrating that peoples never understand that Librem 5 is a Work In Progress phone long term.
There are already out big corporation like Apple ang Google that could satisfy all your whims.
For my Purism they are doing an excellent job and they do what they can do for their budget.
I still not using my Librem 5 as my daily phone, because still need some polish, but i confident that some day soon will awesome, maybe Pure OS Octarine.

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We need to avoid invalidating others’ frustrations, carlosgonz. I would like to have people be more patient and understanding but if they’re not able to use the technology, we should take the feedback and work to address it. As a community, we run the risk of alienating users if we dismiss complaints as simply not understanding it.

The camera function? Useless: Dark display, distorted colour scheme. Useless!

There are controls at the top that when tapped, a slider appears on the bottom to adjust. I wish it were easier to use for everyone and this temporary control scheme is certainly not intuitive compared to mainstream smartphone point-and-shoot camera apps.

It’s a challenge to build all of the camera aspects from scratch, which includes the driver and software to take pictures. Not to mention, the post-processing that often needs to happen to make pictures look much better from raw. It’s rough for now but hopefully it improves soon.

Messengers… Hey, you offer a phone without a commonly used messenger. SMS? Is that the state of the art? Matrix? Matrix is cool, but who uses Matrix? Maybe in the future, maybe not? Why does Purism care so little about a native Signal-client?

What kind of messengers are you looking for? Proprietary apps such WhatsApp do exist in FlatHub, though Purism will never offer them in their repositories as it is against their company mission.

The Signal website offers steps to install it, though it’s not a one-click solution from the Software store. There’s also an unofficial package of the Signal client in FlatHub, though I can’t say if it works. I would reach out to Signal directly to let them know you’d want to see better Linux support.

The PureOS Store: The number of adaptive productivity apps (section ‘Work’ and ‘Socialize’) is not considerably growing.

It takes a lot of work to port existing applications that were not designed for mobile screens to add adaptive functionality and touch screen capabilities. I wish it could be faster and easier to make mobile-friendly apps, however, it’s not like you can click a button to suddenly gain these features, not to mention the design considerations of changing the layout. A lot of the time, it’s dependent on volunteers’ time. Paid teams dedicated to working on apps and libraries can probably speed it up a bit.

This is reminiscent of when the web was making big strides to making web pages and web apps adaptive and mobile-friendly. It didn’t happen overnight and even now, companies make entire projects out of making their web apps mobile-friendly.

Navigation? Nope! Maps or Pure Maps: Crap! Why does ‘Pure maps’ think that I’m in the centre of Berlin, East Germany right now? The same for ‘Maps’. It locates me in Berlins Neptun fountain. although I am in the northwest of Germany.

I wish I had a solution to this but Maps and Pure Maps shows a location close to where I am when I open the app but then centers somewhere in China. Looking at the GPS wiki entry hasn’t helped me so far either.

Files: How can I change into a subfolder? Single ‘click’, ‘double click‘ ? None of them works. Useless app.

Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Files works for me and to enter folders, I just use a single tap.

Why is the access to web pages so horribly slow? Again and again the inbuilt “Gnome-Web-Browser“ (40.2) says: “Oops! There may be a problem!” while using our fibre-optic-internet access via wlan. Firefox does load the pages and is much faster. I could say that I don’t care about “Gnome-Web Browser”, but your “Install Site as Web Application” function is only built into the preinstalled Web Browser.

Unfortunately GNOME Web is currently not working on the Librem 5 due to a bug in one of the libraries it uses, libwebkit2gtk: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/debs/epiphany/-/issues/38

This will be fixed in the next security backport in Debian Bullseye, though there’s no exact date given.

There is a workaround, though it is not recommended.

The Librem 5 is definitely immature and there’s a lot of room for improvement. I hope that you, ehoff, will give the Librem 5, and more importantly Linux phones, another chance as things improve over time.

Best wishes!

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So just to be clear … did your phone come with the amber release and you stayed on amber or your phone came with amber but you upgraded yourself to the byzantium release or your phone came with byzantium?

lsb_release -c

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So frustrating that peoples never understand that Librem 5 is a Work In Progress phone long term.

Where exactly is that communicated by Purism when you order a phone? According to Purism all essential features are working (phone functionality, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing), according to Purism the phone is the perfect phone for parents:

Parents: You will love the Librem 5 because it will allow you to communicate with your child, while having peace of mind that they are not being compromised or tracked without your permission.

Nowhere do they say: Warning, this is a work-in-progress phone, you may not be able to reach your kids, because the phone functionality is not reliable yet and the battery life is only a couple of hours.

So don’t blame users for expecting those things to work, when Purism put the bar that high themselves.

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Even though you already seem to giving up, you have a good starting point. I’m not a negative person and I really wanted to leave Android/Apple behind, because those ecosystems of Surveillance Capitalism are not acceptable to me anymore.

You can find my list here. It contains almost any point you’re writing about and most of the points are resolved for me.

Bought a second battery. Would have bought a third one if I’d would need it. Bought a charger that can charge the battery outside the phone.

Big annoyance! But a workaround is being worked on and if you have basic linux knowledge you can install it by hand already (you can find information in my todo list).

I could live with this until now, but I found it strange also that the calendar needs so much time to load.

As for other things that still need to improve the solution to this might be to use a web-app instead. Maybe someone can point you to a good mobile-friendly web-application for calendars (if it’s not next-/owncloud itself already).

Yeah, bye-bye point and shoot mobile phone camera. The camera works with manual settings only. You need to set the color balance and the exposure manually by tapping on the values shown on the screen and then using the slider that will show up.

If I need to take pictures I carry a point-and-shoot very small camera around (which I did before the Librem5, also, because my anterior 2013 android phone had be repaired a few times and the cameras quality had been lost on the way).

But yes, this is a real show-stopper at the moment.

Might be important if you’re into statistics :wink: . If you are missing something in particular you could ask for it.

SMS/MMS worked on my Librem5 out of the box from the first day - except when the damn modem error let’s it vanish. But then it is recovered by a friendly script automatically and receives SMS/MMS afterwards fine, again.

I didn’t try, but I think you can use xmpp in chatty. Just tried and installed it on my notebook: Surprise! It suddenly supports, irc and discord also from the look at it? If it doesn’t work, yet, it seems to be work in progress (which I do see at many places).

On my last holiday I used for navigation while biking exclusively PureMaps which is a great application. Until now it can’t keep up with Osmand, but it worked very well offline, showed me the place I’m at on the map and navigated offline.

Well, the gps fix (especially the first one ever) needs some time, but once it found the position it followed my movement very well.

BTW: There is a lot of work going on to improve this.

Best part of this for me: I switched off the services that try to estimate my position by sending informations about ip, wifi networks near or cell towers to mozilla, google or the like. And it really works without that. No data leaking - just like with my good old gps receiver made by Garmin around year 2000.

I agree. I find it very hard to use and the bad part is that the same applies to file dialogues when saving or opening from an application. The double tapping on the icon mostly works for me, but for directory navigation in mobile use (as opposed to docked mode) I installed the same program that mobian uses:

purism@pureos:~$ flatpak list | grep -i portfol
Portfolio	dev.tchx84.Portfolio	0.9.14	stable	user

I ignore gnome-web. To install web-apps I create a new firefox profile for the app and configure it to my needs. Then I generate a .desktop entry to get an icon in my start menu. Not very comfortable compared to gnome-webs approach, but works and I even have more control - I never found a way to have gnome-web run in fullscreen without menu and border, anyway.

For web-apps I recently looked at Tangram and found it promising.

Hm, I do not use that app much since I’m used to apt-get, apt-cache and flatpak on the command line. I agree that it doesn’t offer the expected user experience.d

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It’s codename byzantium

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First of all, thank you for taking your time to write your review.
Such user feedback is for sure valuable for the product owners at Purism for improving on their products.

I have another issue with the Files app. I just don’t get it how could I do single right click on a file. When I do a single touch press on a file, it just opens the file. So the right click menu is not accessible and this is a limitation if one wants to open the file with a different app than the default or if one wants to open the file properties or do “cut” or “copy” or “rename”. So at the end for many actions apart from “open with default app”, it is almost easier to use the Terminal which is kind of crazy on a phone without a physical keyboard and is an indicator that the Files app is not sufficiently good.

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I guess Librem 5 could become a single phone in use for me when the following condition is fulfilled:
Possibility to run popular Android messenger apps (Telegram, Viber, Signal…) in a virtual machine with possibility to do video calls.

I think I currently don’t miss any other key feature.
Which is actually pretty nice considering that Dos is working on Waydroid for Librem 5. I can imagine that after the incoming Waydroid release from Dos the main limitation would be if Telegram/Viber/Signal in Waydroid are going to be able to utilize the Camera. Maybe I could use a USB Camera until the utilization of the L5 camera gets implemented.

P.S. What is the best way to watch YouTube on L5? Utilizing the hardware decoding is a must have. This is something else that I do on Android that I don’t do on L5 and would do it if it was my only phone.

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For sure, that’s what I do. But, it’s my third attempt to make it my daily driver. And yes, I will keep on trying. And yes, I’m a promoter of free software/hardware projects for a decade now. I give my money, “venture-capital” if you like, not expecting any profit.
But, I give my feedback from time to time, because I know that I don’t expect too much.

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Hey, really nice “to do list”. I will check it out.

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Regarding the subject of this topic

Had a chat with some friends of mine regarding crowdfounded items of mine just an hour ago. Was able to tell them i backed 3 items. An already almost completely developed waterrower this year. Already delivered. Beautiful. A very special ergonomic keyboard having had to overcome a lot of the known supply chain challenges last year. Already delivered. Really beautiful.

Only comment of one of the guys: “Waiting since years for a mobile? You know technical stuff’s outdating very fast?!?” with a certain expression like are you out of your brains in his face… ;)?

I’m excited what the L5 might look and feel like. But more and more i feel a feeling deep inside telling me “nice toy, but probably a future brick in your shelf…”. Honestly hoping it’ll prove to be wrong.

Purism probably mainly attracts a very special, mainly somewhat very tolerant and forgiving audience, that closes one or the other eye out of sympathy.

Nevertheless one mustn’t forget, time’s changing, things, experiences and expectations evolve with the world surrounding us.

Let’s hope, we’ll see more mainly positive reviews of the L5 in the future. And hopefully the market’s not showing the need for an L10 to L12 in the meantime…

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That is of course true. (Almost any ITC gadget that you buy is out of date shortly after you walk out of the store, if it wasn’t already out of date at the time of purchase. If you bought on discount from the store, it might well be the latter i.e. it was a clearance discount to clear out old stock because a new model is available.)

However the core problems that the Librem 5 is designed to address are getting worse, not better. So in that respect, the specification of the Librem 5 is getting better without the phone changing at all. :slight_smile:

Regardless of the technical specification becoming out of date, the phone is only obsolete if it can no longer do what you need it to do.

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This totally depends on you. I have some “bricks” in my shelf for various reasons. I tend to keep the stuff I’m really interested in and hope to find time to play with it and use it.

My ex-Androids (all hardware repaired, all running some kind of AOSP) are bricks on my shelf. I decided to get out of that ecosystem as fast as possible and here comes first the Pinephone (slightly under-powered, but still already a good alternative) and finally my Librem5.

Yes, there is a lot to do, still and I’m happy trying to be part of that process while gaining a lot of insight into the hardware and software of the phone - already a lot more than I ever had on any Android device. I own the Librem5 - it doesn’t own me.

I give away data from the phone if I decide to and I do not need to stop the phone selling off my personal data. I use it sometimes like a notebook in docked mode and am happy to carry a small computer in my pocket. Sometimes I replace the battery when I really need more runtime away from the power grid than it provides. Sometimes, rarely.

It’s totally your decision how you’ll look at that device and whether you’re really willing to give up on an ecosystem driven by Surveillance Capitalism to start over in a new, evolving ecosystem that offers different services at different prices.

When it comes to all the rest of the world (beside the few geeks already running daily on a linux mobile phone): they’ll tell you on every channel they have that you need to be connected and you need to use this or that to be part of society and you need to have the latest shiney thing.

Any Linux Mobile Phone is a phone for people who decide to take their own way.

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Sorry, but you want to walk out having two batteries and a charger in your pocket just because there is a problem with software and/or HW Design? I cannot use my Librem 5 as my main phone for the same reason (the battery drains too fast) and just have it laying on my desk.

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You may be able to skip the charger if two fully charged batteries (one in the phone) are sufficient to cover the period “on the go”. But yeah everyone realises that power consumption is a priority, hot button issue.

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I don’t carry the charger :wink: : I use it to to charge one battery - either because I need the L5 otherwise than having it plugged in or because I needed two batteries in a long day away from power.

I do not write that this is ideal. It is a compromise and for me it’s a good one.

My first mobile phone just had SMS - at that time for free before they started charging per message. As far as I know it didn’t spy on my more than carrying a mobile phone in general gives away to the provider used.

To be honest, I do not remember the battery runtime, but it could not have been that good: I remember an extra large battery that made the phone even thicker.

Now - after having decided that I’d not carry an Android or iOS phone anymore - I carry a Librem5.

Unbelievable how big the difference and how advanced the technology.

Once again I’m back to a phone that doesn’t spy on me, that allows me to switch it off (and make sure it stays off by removing the battery) and that even allows me to deactivate the modem and its sensors to give me a small computer I can use in private without having to share my location or any other data with anybody else.

Yes, sure, sweetness calls. “Come to the dark side, we have cookies!” Battery runtime as high as needed to keep the little surveillance device delivering data about the people carrying them around. Everything polished, simple and user friendly. Any reason that could hinder anybody to use and carry such a modern miracle is ironed out in shortest time to keep the data flowing.

Everyone has to make their choice. I chose to stop delivering data, helping to make the linux mobile ecosystem better and more usable for anybody who cares.

You can do the same by providing constructive feedback as an active user or even taking part in development. You could even help to find the next freedom respecting platform to build a phone on which doesn’t have the same design limits as imx8 with external modules.

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Firefox-ESR with PrivacyRedirect or LibRedirect extension?

Alternatively, use a device belonging to someone you hate. :slight_smile:

P.S. If you search the word “video” in the PureOS store, you may find some options to try.

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[…]
My first mobile phone just had SMS - at that time for free before they started charging per message.

Once again I’m back to a phone that doesn’t spy on me, that allows me to switch it off (and make sure it stays off by removing the battery) and that even allows me to deactivate the modem and its sensors to give me a small computer I can use in private without having to share my location or any other data with anybody else.

Everyone has to make their choice. I chose to stop delivering data, helping to make the linux mobile ecosystem better and more usable for anybody who cares.

You can do the same by providing constructive feedback as an active user or even taking part in development. You could even help to find the next freedom respecting platform to build a phone on which doesn’t have the same design limits as imx8 with external modules.

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