When starting it first time, it somehow managed to forget the country/locations settings in the setup screen. This caused that the Software Store didn’t work. Nothing was being downloaded or updated (stuck at 0%). Apt from command line worked, though. After setting the language again from Settings, the store began working.
Also after every boot, wifi doesn’t work at all. I have to toggle the hardware button for it to start working.
And of course you can’t select your country so that monetary units, temperature units etc. are correct. In typical Debian style I copied en_DK to en_FI, edited the file and generated a new locale. Now I could set Formats to Finland. But the Restart button in the same screen doesn’t do anything. I had to reboot manually.
Also installed ssh and enabled ssh server.
Now it also hard locked once and I had to hard reset it. Didn’t respond to buttons or ping. I wonder if this was because I tried to enable Automatic Suspend in Power settings. And for some reason it didn’t want to boot afterwards, the boot logo was just spinning for many minutes. I had to reset it once more and then it started up directly.
Well, what to say. I like having pure Linux on a phone (I’ve used Sailfish OS and really like being able to SSH to my phone and do stuff). But it still feels kind of limited and unfinished. Absolutely necessary applications like Authenticator doesn’t seem to work (after installing from flathub by command line).
It won’t be my daily driver, but it will be interesting to see where it is going.
Yeah, I need to find some good use for it So far my impression is that battery drains fast. So the phone also gets quite hot when you do something with it. Scrolling/display update is a bit sluggish. There is probably no GPU acceleration. But as I’ve understood there are hopes that drivers can improve. The hardware isn’t otherwise slow, I think. It boots a lot faster than my i7/M.2 SSD desktop PC (running Fedora Linux). Similarly to other devices I’ve used with native Linux, memory amount is totally adequate. Can’t be compared with a memory hog like Android (Android apps are insane with memory). But, again, if flatpaks and such become more popular (and every app bundles a browser engine and their grandmother), the heydays aren’t over for memory manufacturers yet.
In my experience, it has only ever been “warm,” not very hot. The thermal readings in the Usage app usually range from high 20’s C to low-to-mid 30’s, depending on what apps I’m using.
As you can select language separately in Settings, the only thing you need to do to create additional locales is to run “sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales” and select any language you wish, e.g. fi_FI. Then you are able to select Language and Formats separately. So no need to create custom locales as I did below.
By default on the Librem 5, there aren’t many languages and formats to choose between.
On my PC I use sv_FI locale, but I can’t tell how well PureOS is translated to either Swedish or Finnish. That’s why I didn’t bother to change the language. I made a copy of /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_DK (which is an odd exception among the different locales; all other ones are official country language/format combinations) and simply and quickly made an en_FI locale. You can download the file here if you want to have a look, but note that I made it quickly; could have some errors. I’ve mostly changed all instances of DK, Denmark etc. to FI, Finland in the file. Thus English language, but Finnish formats (units, formatting etc.). You also have to edit /etc/locale.gen and add a row “en_FI.UTF-8 UTF-8”. Then run locale-gen to create the locale. Then in Settings, Region & Language, you can select Formats Finland.
Nothing prevents you from adding for instance “fi_FI.UTF-8 UTF-8”” to /etc/locale.gen and creating the locale with “locale-gen”. And fi_FI locale templates already exist, so no need to create or modify any files like I did. Then you could choose both Finnish language and Formats. But it is probably not completely translated when it isn’t available by default in the first place.
I expect a screen protector to arrive. When I get that, I will install my SIM to L5 and bye bye android. I won’t be able to take pictures until support for that comes but I can live with it. I can sacrifice that for a while for having ethernet and serial over USB, simple ssh and file transfer, OpenPGP card installed, soft linking big installations or big personal data such as mail in an sdcard, sturdy instead of flimsy design with good grip, beautiful torch, great music over headphones, full firefox installation instead of few Mbytes, and more.
I think that if you fix the wifi issue you should give it a chance to serve you. If you wait for it to become and android it will never happen (thank gods… I meant purism).
That was never why I bought it in the first place. I’ve used a Nokia N900, pure linux phone for many years. After that I moved to Jolla Sailfish (their original Jolla phone and after that a Sony Xperia X). Eventually I gave up on Sailfish and been using LineageOS on the Sony since.
Linux is otherwise working very well and that is why I stopped using Windows on my personal PCs around 15 years ago and been using Linux ever since. My PC experience with Linux has been very positive. I have contributed several patches to various open source projects over the years that have fixed bugs that I’ve experienced in my own PC usage. Right now we are fortunate that many services on the Internet are pure web services that works in browsers. So Linux is an accepted citizen on the PC platform. On the phone side of it things are a lot different. Many parts of the society (at least in this part of the world) expect you to buy, communicate, authenticate or otherwise interact with them either with an Android or iOS app. If you don’t have that you are left with a clunky browser interface or stupid authentication schemes involving paper password tables or some such (looking at you banks). So I don’t know. For now I’m going to keep using also the Android phone.
I wasn’t sure whether I should piggyback on this, but when I started a similar topic it told me there were similar, so…
I received the phone yesterday (ordered September 30, 2017). I started trying to use it today.
I had bought the ViaScreens Impact screen protector. With shipping (which was $7) from England, it was close to $20. I put it on first thing, before trying the phone at all. The nice thing about that was there was no dust on the screen yet (nor fingerprints). I was able to put it on well which was a little surprising as I can normally screw up anything. It fits perfectly and I got all the bubbles out.
Had the issue with not being able to connect to Wifi, but I had seen in the forums that you had to have the date and time set correctly. Had trouble doing that in Settings so I did it via the command line. Once it was set correctly I was able to connect to Wifi. Then I was able to apply updates which I also did from the command line.
I made some test calls. The first one seemed fine to my VOIP landline and seemed to use 4G. I then tried calling my wife’ s cell which is on AT&T network and it dropped to 3G. She couldn’t hear me so I used pavucontrol (which I installed) to update the microphone output to more than 100%. Then she could hear me. I am on an MVNO on top of AT&T by the way. I still would like to set VOLTE as preferred but that is not an option in the Mobile options. Supposedly it can be done via AT command but I haven’t seen anyone mention the exact command in the forum.
I tried texting and it seemed to work OK. I just sent simple text.
Setting the Weather location was clunky. I couldn’t set Automatic Location.
My overall impression is that this is a Linux computer which is also a phone, which is what I expected. It will take a while to make it really usable. A look forward to the new release that was highlighted the other day.
Still to be done. (I find automatic location a bit creepy a lot of the time so I am not too sad that the GNSS support is not ready. In other words, even when it is working, I will probably disable access to location information by most applications, if that is an option. Probably only navigation / mapping applications will get access for me. If you travel a lot then I guess it makes sense to give the Weather application automatic location access.)
There are lots of loose ends but progress is being made.
So far my impression is that battery drains fast. So the phone also gets quite hot when you do something with it. Scrolling/display update is a bit sluggish. There is probably no GPU acceleration. But as I’ve understood there are hopes that drivers can improve. The hardware isn’t otherwise slow, I think. It boots a lot faster than my i7/M.2 SSD desktop PC (running Fedora Linux). Similarly to other devices I’ve used with native Linux, memory amount is totally adequate. Can’t be compared with a memory hog like Android (Android apps are insane with memory). But, again, if flatpaks and such become more popular (and every app bundles a browser engine and their grandmother), the heydays aren’t over for memory manufacturers yet.