I finally own an Evergreen Librem5. I was pleased to see how the printed “quick start” referenced the “Fractal” Matrix messenger, which would be one of the first apps I’d install. However, even after bringing the OS up to date and refreshing the PureOS store, “Fractal” is not available.
I am also somewhat surprised that the available PureOS store is version 3.36.1 with a copyright until 2019 only. Am I somehow stuck with ancient software? How do I rectify this?
The latest version of Fractal is 4.4.1b1. See: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/tags
To install the latest version, you can use Flatpak. See the instructions here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal
However, there is a new version of Fractal called Fractal-Next, which is a complete rewrite from the ground up. If you want to try out Fractal-Next, use Flatpak to install it. See: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/tree/fractal-next
I assume that you are still using the Amber distro, which is why you got such an old version of Fractal. You can reflash you phone to use Byzantium, but you will lose all your data on the L5. See: https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Phone/Troubleshooting/Reflashing_the_Phone.html
Reflashing sounds like the right way to go, as I do not have any data yet anyway. I am surprised a bit though that this is necessary, considering PureOS is based on Debian, which you never have t o reinstall…
It’s cool that Flatpak is available too, though I reckon that most software will be unusable on the phone. A couple of times already I got myself into situations where the UI became unusable because the screen estate was too small, and I could not get rid of a dialog that overtook the foreground. So I’d rather stay with the apps built for the device.
Please be so kind and share your order and delivery date. Is it a L5 or L5 USA? We´re tracking here in the forum the shipment and yours is the first one since many weeks.
Purism is planning that the standard sudo apt full-upgrade command will work in the future for distribution upgrades, but from what I understand, Purism added stuff like full disk encryption with Byzantium that doesn’t work with apt full-upgrade, so reflashing the phone is the only option at this point. If you don’t have any data that is important on the L5, I recommend reflashing the phone, because Byzantium is significantly better than Amber in my opinion.
A search in the source code shows that Fractal is using libhandy, so it may have a responsive interface, but I didn’t install it to check.
It’s an L5. It was shipped in March 2021 (ordered in the original crowdfunding campaign in 2017), but to an address I couldn’t get to at the time. I only just received it at my physical address. So maybe not representative?
Thanks for sharing the information, even if it is not a recent shipped device. Good luck with updating it to Byzantium.
To be clear, when you flash Byzantium, you have the option of flashing an encrypted root partition or flashing an unencrypted root partition. The restriction only really makes sense in the former case. I believe that the latter may be the default.
I use nheko as my matrix client with end to end encryption. It is available as flatpak or as native deb from my personal repo at https://people.debian.org/~praveen/nheko/