The power management is downright impressive on the Librem 5, and when you consider that it is literally blazing the trail for Linux on mobile it is even more impressive.
That said, my solution to the issue of charging is the laptop dock solution. I really want to minimize the number of charge cycles I am using in a day, and I really like how the laptop docks provide power without charging, greatly extending battery life.
A quick follow up, just out of nowhere the Librem 5 was making and receiving calls via VoLTE on Telekom in Germany.
With Signal now working on it as well, I am super close to being able to use this as my primary phone. Great work Purism!
Are you using the elagost Signal flatpak?
Yep! Works great although I am having problems with it freezing when forcing Wayland use.
Just wanted to update this with the information that my cellular modem is finally working as it should since switching carriers. Really was frustrating, but now the modem seems to be pretty reliable. Phone calls all work, and even wake the phone while sleeping. (Kind of an inadvertent wake on lan feature, no?)
I really appreciate all the work Purism continues to make on improving the phone and look forward to continued progress as things mature.
Did I understand you correctly Volte works for you with Telekom Germany?
My firmware is updated, Volte is enabled but as soon as I make a call I get the fallback to 2g. The call quality is so bad that my girlfriend refuses to talk to me.
Not sure what u mean.
There are tons of features and fixes to come for L5…
Purism
Try different Firmware versions…
support has sent me a new modem with the appropriate firmware.
Why not just reprogramming the modem with other firmware? and testing…
@carlosgonz I don’t want to break anything and I don’t know how it’s done.
Basically, it would be good to know which firmware works for @2disbetter.
But his statement sounds to me as if something has been activated on the Telekom side.
Hi st.boom, I can’t really say. I got an experimental pacakge from Purism support that basically makes the necessary changes to the modem config to permit volte, however if can brick your modem, etc. So it is risky. I did that, and then out of the blue the sim just stopped working.
I put a new Aldi Talk sim in, and it is working great. Calls seems to be volte as well.
Ah ok that explains it Aldi-Talk uses the o2/e+ network.
With Vodafone and O2, VoLTE seems to work.
I remembered this post. Maybe it would help:
Yes, Aldi Talk has worked with VoLTE on a Librem 5 for a long time, provided the modem firmware was ok. I used Aldi Talk as well.
I wanted to visit this thread again after the recent debugging kernel I was given has made my cellular modem connection SOOO much better. The Librem 5 has become a real contender now for replacing my degoogled smartphone.
I could complain about battery life but the issue here is that this is comparing apples to oranges. Android and iOS are shadows of desktop computing OSes (iOS especially). Because of this they effectively just turn off, killing applications and process all in the name of saving power. On top of this the hardware being used is in these companies hand and power tuning through drivers and support are priority actions that involves large sums of money.
The Librem 5 by contrast is running desktop Linux with a custom composer. To give you a bit of reality, the MNT Reform, which has 16,000 mAh of battery juice, but using the same SoC gets about 8 hours of battery life, when using it for an hour and the rest in standby/suspend. The Librem 5 with only 4,000 mAh is getting around 12 hours of run time using a similar scenario. The L5 is powering a touchscreen, cellular radio, ambient sensors, haptic motor, etc.
On top of this the L5 wakes when you receive a phone call (I am now tracking 100% success with this since using the testing kernel) or SMS. Purism started knowing nothing about the mobile space. Yet they have the most competent Linux desktop powered phone by far. Their efforts are the very reason there are even any other Linux desktop powered phones.
Purism management side of the house still is a wreck, because they still have not come clean about things that are pretty crucial for trust. But their development side of the house is making the dream real. I’m here for them. (I’m not just trying to sling mud either, I believe Kyle and others are really trying to right wrongs where they can.)
MNT just started crowdfunding their newest product the Pocket Reform. I love it. I preordered it. The truth? The Librem 5 is the true pocket computer. It really is.
Agreed on all points.
On top of that, there is the psychological part of the device. Mine just arrived and the moment I powered it on it was like a giant weight was lifted psychologically. There is something to be said about the unseen psychological weight of a giant corporations always watching everything that you do, the imposition of arbitrary design choices, the imposition of the normies putting evolutionary pressure on the app stores to produce shit software and so on.
I powered my device on, the whole ui is EXACTLY how I was expecting it and within 10 minutes I was sshd in, copied all of my preferences, config and installed my favourite tools on the device. No need to deal with MTP or jump through hoops.
Agreed on the battery, and I think the solution here will have to be unique to Linux. Whatever power management tools are created will have to have white listing / black listing built into it for those users that need to match their device performance profile to their use case.
However, hearing that cel modem connections are getting to a place where we can consider the device a daily driver is a game changer.
What kernel is that?
6.2. Primalmotion hooked me up with it. It is completely only a testing / debug kernel at the moment, but it contains some fixes and work that seem to really work. Some of it rolled into 6.1 already which is already officially out.
How much of the “some of which” is rolled into the kernel already? If not, how much more needs to be pushed out to the production kernel? Is this kernel available in the latest updates?
Thanks.
I can’t say, but I can say the intention is to bring it to byzantine as soon as possible. The goodness rolls down hill.