New Post: The Real Speed of the Librem 5

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Yes, it was announced in may 23d roadmap

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If you read carefully you see that they want Epiphany the default browser … in long term. It’s more a temporary decision - at least planed as such.

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Their hope for the future doesn’t change their currently announced position…

And changes nothing about the points raised regarding the current performance…

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I just wanted to complete the view and make visible that it’s not a planned one way road. And as it sounds they also (want to) put resources into Epiphany (more than just hope). I may wrong, but you can do with that information what ever you want to do. I just think that’s not a totally useless information.

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Not useless, but also not “on topic”. The relevant point was that Firefox/browsing on Waydroid (on the Librem5) is much faster than Firefox/browsing using native Librem 5 programs. New Post: The Real Speed of the Librem 5 - #15 by JCS . The fact that this has devolved into Firefox vs Firefox-esr vs Epiphany is muddying the waters since it’s true regardless of the particular browser.

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Even if that’s true, why telling me with my 2 sentence side note? My post was not the first “off topic” and never really needed a reaction to drift even further into off topic … Let’s just stop this discussion of “is this post okay or not” and simply let’s go back to topic.

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Which you continue by replying to mine. And I have now replied to yours. ad infinitum …

I’ll point out that @OpojOJirYAlG tried 3 times to politely point out that people were off topic. It’s true that you weren’t the first to be offtopic … but you were the first who tried to justify it by saying that the offtopic comment wasn’t useless.

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In mid-2021, when I wrote this FAQ question: FAQ 3.12. Does the Librem 5 provide hardware acceleration?

Phosh, GTK apps, and Firefox did not have hardware acceleration from the GPU/VPU, but QT apps, Chromium and Epiphany did.

I would appreciate @dos or another Purism dev giving us updated info on hardware acceleration on the L5.

The bigger issue than speed for me is the heat of the phone and the short battery life, which are both caused by energy consumption. This can be improved to some degree in the software, if GTK4 can add support for OpenGL hardware acceleration or the Etnaviv driver can add support for Vulkan, so we get hardware acceleration that way.

However, even with hardware acceleration, the L5 will never be as fast or as energy efficient as a modern smartphone, because a modern Snapdragon, Mediatek or Exynos processor has about 20 times the processing power of the i.MX 8M Quad. A planar 28nm processor with 4 Cortex-A53 cores simply doesn’t compete with today’s FinFET 4nm processors with 8 cores.

Sadly, the i.MX 8M Plus, i.MX 95 and RK3566 look to be the only new Linux chips that can fit in the power envelope of a phone, and none of them have that good of performance. Without any Cortex-7x cores, they simply don’t have much processing power and none of them have strong GPUs. The I.MX 95 is probably the best, of the bunch, but its Mali-G310 is a pretty weak GPU, and NXP still hasn’t started production.

Maybe an underclocked RK3588 can be used in a phone, but I suspect that it will have a very short battery life, like the PhinePhone Pro with an underclocked RK3399S.

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Because L5 it is not a Smartphone but PPC :wink:

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All my HTML and Text Pages load very fast in Milliseconds like it have to be on my Desktop Linux System with Adblocker and without Telemetry or DNS collected Data. Just my Librem 5 have a smaller energy Footprint.

So yes i like the Librem5 compared to my Android Devices. Cause they use Google Code for Telemetry, even its a Lineage and sell Push Notifications to Alphabet in its default enabled State. So: I really love my Librem5.

I just use my Android Phones for the Alarm Clock, and did not move it the whole Day…
@bear454
You did not open Firefox on Waydroid, you will have an Android App of Firefox its a totally different application. Just do not close your Firefe and have an instant Open already. Your Linux one is like your Desktop, you could use Addblockers… on the Android Version you will not have the possibility in the same Way.

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I know the intent of the post and certainly having carefully designed software with good code has helped the L5 along tremendously and the experience is way more polished than it was 2 years ago and faster. The video and loading speed times however are not what I am experiencing so maybe he is running it on non released updated software :slight_smile: !?

Firefox-ESR the one thing that is most bugging me other than the obvious menue issues is that the first time you load a website it takes not 1 second, or 10 seconds, it is more like 30 seconds. Websites that have loaded say Amazon page refresh load times are around 6 seconds. Maybe that is all because it isn’t hardware accelerated on the L5 yet? (that said on my desktop running Firefox with Ubuntu and Wayland the page load times area also generally not that great). Also even closing apps doesn’t always work as smoothly as shown in the video (mostly with GTK3 based apps), when I close certain apps they sortof jam and stay around for 1-3 seconds before closing. Unfortunately from a user experiencing everything above 1 second becomes noticeable.

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With 6 cores that seems to be a good upgrade from the i.MX 8 Quad, maybe power requirements also improve since it uses 16nm technology versus the i.MX 8 Quad 28nm (and 2GHz vs 1.5GHz certainly doesn’t hurt). So if that is something to upgrade the L5 motherboad with why not?! Not sure they are already selling it though. It looks like there are some companies already drafting production of devices based on it.

VAR-SOM-MX93 : NXP iMX93 ARM System on Module (SoM) / Computer on Module not sure what is different from the 93 vs 95.

Ah ok it states coming soon for the 95:

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Thank you very much for the informative answer :slight_smile:
I personally don’t need a cutting edge CPU, and I understand the compromises behind the choice they made, I was just curious about the current hardware acceleration via GPU, as the phone interface seems sometimes lagging for no good reason. Thanks again.

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Yes the PHOneSHell still need Acceleration that why stutering.

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From my experience most issues in responsiveness come from the CPU. But as developer you can workaround a lot by putting intensive tasks into the background and handling them asynchronously.

The GPU is not an issue. I can run one of my own game projects using Godot with OpenGL ES 2 fluidly, hitting 60fps.

I think in general it would be good if a next iteration uses a more efficient CPU. Because sure the current performance can be enough, especially with optimization on application level. But more performance could help in some cases while in others you could reduce power draw.

But personally I don’t need a better GPU. I would prefer getting Vulkan drivers over raw performance upgrades any day.

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FWIW I appreciate that what you say may be technically correct in that there is more engagement than there was and that you may eventually engage even more. However after two weeks and most of that engagement being about your RV internet setup or how you will be engaging more it rings fairly hollow for me.

I mean we have some clearly challenged claims without any response we have other posts about news articles with no responses… I would personally have rather there been no claim of upcoming engagement, even if no timeline was established that only opens you up to the reader establishing their own “reasonable” timeline. Also from my perspective instead of saying “I will he doing …” just do whatever it is and let the actions speak for themselves.

Also being as the context to the post you replied to was this thread and the criticisms raised replying to say there would be more involvement then not addressing any of the criticisms weeks later seems disingenuous. Especially when blog posts made after this, while less egregiously so, still are more marketing fluff than the posts from when Kyle was active.

Just my perspective based on my observations and experiences.

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Maybe we should all volunteer for Purism and be the change we want to be.

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You make a valid point that I’m been quiet for the past 2 weeks and I apologize for not staying on top of this thread. I have been onboarding with the company and asking loads of internal questions thus far; being a globally-dispersed and remote-first team, I have been learning who does what and who to reach out to for certain things such that everything is not a “boy cries wolf” moment and distracts engineers from making the improvements we so desperately want, etc. As anyone can imagine, joining a new company is often a “drinking from a fire hydrant” experience to start.

Regardless, I can definitely understand how the general public doesn’t see that activity and, by not engaging with the community right away, my objectives seem disingenuous. I’ll make sure to spend a greater percentage of my time going through the forums to ensure that I can best advocate for the extended community.

So let’s get into the points made in this thread:

I agree that the camera app is neither a polished UX nor “blazing fast,” but it is functional at this point and certainly miles ahead of where it was not very long ago. My impression from the message is that the camera wasn’t in the forefront of the “blazing fast” claim but rather given a nod that it is functional and doesn’t consume any resources other than disk space when the app is closed.

That’s the goal!! I’ve personally been daily-driving my L5 since receiving it in March. I’m a pretty understanding and patient person, but it stretches that patience sometimes. While it’s been fascinating to me to directly witness how much progress has been made in phosh, etc, over even the past year, I’ve kept my e.g. multitasking expectations tempered and this is probably the largest “culture shock” of a user migrating to the L5 for daily use.

I have my suspicions but am verifying with a developer and am awaiting a response. I stressed that this would be valuable material for a blog post.

Oh, they’re intimately aware of the situation and are working on it. Just takes time. :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes, although I haven’t verified this with the team, my impression is that this is the ideal browser for PureOS but that a more performant browser is needed as a temporary stopgap.

So what is new?

I’ve been working with the marketing team to understand their practices and work toward tailored messaging based on respective audiences. I have also been working with the team to provide viable upgrade options for the L5 which act on the claims of lifetime updates and user-serviceability. This is to say, a 3 → 4GB RAM; 32GB → 128GB eMMC motherboard upgrade. This may not do much for initial stuttering as resources are cached but will greatly help out the many users running WayDroid while doing any meaningful multitasking from within PureOS. I’m working to produce either a tool or a document describing how to easily check which PCB revision is installed on the L5 to denote hardware upgrade compatibility.

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This is super exciting to me.

Thank you for taking this in the way it was intended and sharing your perspective as well it is super helpful and appreciated.

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Well if you want me to read blog posts again like I did since Purism started creating them:

  1. Keep @david.hamner’s blog posts to videos mixed with text, not strictly text only as of recently.
  2. Tell @rexmlee to write paragraphs instead of one-liner sentences.

That is good enough for now, but if you are aiming for excellence, work towards @Kyle_Rankin’s style by creating blog posts with inline citations to prior blog posts in order to stack arguments. The cherry on top would be the authors responding to their blog posts on the community forums.

Wordpress does support comments using Discus, but that is a function that would require internal discussion.

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