I received my Evergreen today. My first impressions:
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Shipping: Unlike the OP I never got a direct communication from DHL, only the tracking link from Purism’s shipping notification email. So I never had any information about the taxes I had to pay until the DHL person arrived and demanded 130 EUR in cash. This was not optimal.
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BUG: My home wifi doesn’t work (the L5 disconnects after a few tens of seconds and doesn’t manage to reconnect), possibly due to the same 40MHz vs. 20 MHz problem discussed at [MyL5] Received my Librem 5, WiFi doesn't work :-(. A different wifi network works flawlessly, so it’s not a hardware issue but something related to that specific network. There’s nothing special about its configuration, and we have lots of other devices using it without problems though, so I would rather not change its configuration to please the misbehaving L5. I haven’t tried https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux-next/-/merge_requests/258 yet, if that’s the fix I hope it lands in the standard repository soon.
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The keyboard settings are confusing. The “German (Austria)” keyboard has no umlaut keys at all. The “German” keyboard does, but in a way that is different from iOS, Android, Sailfish OS, and actual physical German keyboards: On German keyboards the Ö key is on the home row just to the right of L (in place of the US keyboard’s semicolon). All other software keyboards have it in the same place, on the “normal” keyboard screen. The L5’s German keyboard requires one to first enter the umlaut menu to get this key.
I’m puzzled by the whole approach of the software keyboard. My understanding is that it requires some modifications to the source code to set up new keyboard variants. But clearly it seems to import some information from the XKB symbols database, since I can select an “English (intl, with AltGr dead keys)” keyboard, which comes from there. Needless to say, it has neither an AltGr key nor any dead keys, nor any “international” keys. If the keyboard actually imported the XKB keyboard definitions, not just some names, all the many keyboard variants would be set up correctly automatically. -
I’m confused by the UI concept. I thought the idea was to make desktop applications adapt to the L5 screen size and orientation, but not even the default applications work nicely in portrait mode. The most egregious offender might be the the email client, which in portrait mode only shows a list of mail folders without any indication that mail bodies are hidden to the right of the folder list but only visible in portrait mode.
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On the topic of email, it took me a while to figure out that “Geary” was the email client. The icon doesn’t evoke email to me. I would appreciate a more explicit name.
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I would prefer it if the L5 didn’t vibrate on keyboard key presses and certain (but far from all!) other taps on UI elements. I didn’t find any setting to turn this off.
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This is minor, but I would like to change my lock code to a 5-digit one, but at least 6 digits are required. I’ll just note that the keychain password has no problem being 5 digits.
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Small UI things, for example: The lock screen requires that I swipe the upwards arrow, tapping doesn’t work. The bottom-of-the-screen menu requires that I tap the upwards arrow, swiping doesn’t work. The notification screen only goes away by tapping into it, not outside it.
That’s a lot of complaints, I know! I hope they are understood as the constructive criticism that I am trying to give. Thanks to the Purism team for their hard work so far, and thanks for all the improvements that are sure to come!