I don’t think so. While trying to get away from all the ‘baggage’ of using Apple or Android, I wound up choosing an L5. Clearly, it stands out as a departure from business-as-usual. However, there are issues, and solutions/suggestions are doled out in geek-speak. To appeal to the public, solutions must be readily available, easily understood and reproducible by people lacking knowledge of the terminology I have found so far. This is a suggestion for Purism: get someone who knows very little about cell phones, apps, and relevant tech, and have them do the usage tutorials. I have watched several videos and am surprised by what the viewer is assumed to already know. I ran across a reference to an article in a tech magazine on Purism’s phone from a few years ago, which stated that it wasn’t ready for the general public. True, the OS is not the polished, smooth operating environment we’ve enjoyed for years on the other platforms, but even they didn’t start out that way. So, am I going to get rid of my new L5? Nope. I like what it stands for and hope to join the other enthusiasts in doing some app development myself. I’d really like to widen the appeal of Pure OS by getting some dependably working apps available. Most of the apps that I have tried on my new phone are either non-functional or unappealing, due to the difficulty of learning how to use them. As of now, I don’t have much utility with this phone - and I depend on it for many things besides calls and texts. Come on developers - have a non-techie ‘edit’ your app for user-friendliness. For this OS to be successful and this cause to continue gaining popularity, it must be what people will change over to from systems they already know and are content with.
As painful as it may be to hear, L5 is in practice really not meant for everyone, even if the marketing seems to indicate that. It’s not even for all enthusiasts. Manage your expectations: prepare to learn much, expect to have to live with things that won’t be fixed fast (if at all) and do not think that Purism has resources or motivation to respond to, or seriously act like a responsible global company (it’s tiny). You are welcome to become one of the volunteer developers, if you have the know-how. And voicing sane suggestions to the company via the forum has been mostly fruitless (although they did drop the plans to start a toy robot line - maybe coincidentally). The history and warnings of this saga is available here at the forum but it’s a long read (short version). I believe you are at the moment at stage one, or maybe three - welcome, most of us have been through them over the years (which maybe makes the forum a support group of sorts… 
).
Thanks for the reply. I’m new and you told me exactly what I had come to realize already. I kinda figured that they ARE tiny and facing an uphill battle, but it remains a cold fact that unless more people switch over, Purism will never be more than an oddity, soon to be relegated to the ‘dustbin’ of history. I certainly don’t want that to happen. I don’t like to put anybody on a pedestal, but it would appear that they are the only ones doing much about giving the customer what they really need. I applaud and support them. I began learning how to develop Android apps a few years ago and had a blast doing it, but time was a factor that made that impossible. I am near retirement now and that will probably solve the time issue.
I look forward to making that happen!
I agree.
In my opinion, the Librem 5 is intended for everyone but it is not ready for everyone.
Your post may be more helpful if it identified specific official Purism documentation that has too much assumed knowledge or would be too difficult for the average non-IT person.
As far as solutions (in this forum, particularly) go, the best answer is that the problems don’t exist in the first place.
And let’s not forget the community wiki FAQ: Home · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
I disagree that suggestions are fruitless. As another example, shortly after I posted this suggestion:
I noticed that Purism included exactly the kind of commitment that I described in their next update on PureOS development.
“We use 100% of PureOS subscription funds for the development of PureOS.”
I have no idea if it was just coincidence, but I’ve been believing that it was an example of responsiveness by Purism 
Then the ad, IMO, is extremely dis/mis-information. The ads state how safe it will be for children to use. The ads wording and phraseology places the L5 being better than the dupoly devices because it doesn’t track us. It suggests that there is a plethora or privacy-respecting software/applications/apps - but access is on and off too much.
An Ad says:
The Librem 5 represents the opportunity for you to take back control and protect your private information, your digital life through free and open source software, open governance, and transparency.
Interpreting what “free” means is still in debate. Some say it means “freeDOM” some say it means at no cost. Caveat emptor
Finally. I’m not the only one to say this. The ads make it look as if it’s as easy or easier to use than the duops spyphones.
I could fill this page 
with my and many many others disappointments. But it would just draw flack. Some suggest that we live with it, get over it, and some jump in and provide information (fixes, patches, command line commands…) and yes, one is expected to be a tch on the same level as those that offer up explanations or excuses for Purism.
On the positive side. Some, even the higher leveled tech support volunteers offer up step x step guides, alternatives, or condolences .
There’s a lot of great helpers here.
Suggestion. I always RTFM - as the saying goes and Due Diligence before going to any Forum, especially here even though there is a wealth of resources - some resources are hard to find. I found some help manuals/articles point to a large database of help not otherwise easily found.
You’re a god-send.
It’s still the best place to go for good, high quality tech support. Too bad it’s needed so much.
~s
Yes, the ol’ “free as in speech” vs “free as in beer” dichotomy.
As I have understood it (having bought my Purism computer coming up to 5 years ago now), the hardware is free as in speech (do with it what you will, Purism won’t try to lock you out like Apple do), while the software used on the hardware is free as in beer (ie no cost, since it is based on Debian which is free). But the software side goes even further in that it (mostly) tries to use software that is auditable – which is why Bluetooth didn’t work out of the box and had to be installed using non-free code. There are threads here going back years that explain how to do that.
Hi Merbil5. Nice to meet you. I switched to a Librem 5 as my phone almost 2 years ago. That’s basically the only phone i used since then. There was a time that I got an old and busted Android out of a faraday cage and maybe used it for a day, but not really.
I know what you’re thinking. It shouldn’t be possible. I’m some guy on the forums – some consumer/user claiming to do some absurdist thing. You might hold a Librem 5 in your hand and then think about what you want your phone to do, and it doesn’t. Pretty quickly it can start to feel like… does it even do anything?
I have this idea in my head now, and I sometimes waffle between wondering if I made it up, and if I’m drinking too much Purism cool-aid, or if there’s a problem growing in society that is really, really bad. But I am starting to have a sense that humanity is losing the battle of intelligence. There’s some rich mafia boss, or some bad person, who is real and is not in my head, who wants a world where everyone has an Android or iOS in their pocket. That person, that thing, is not like the weather that exists indifferent of you. The rain comes and goes on its own, whether you stay under a roof and stay dry or not.
Android and iOS are not like that. If you stop using them – in this metaphor, if you built a roof and stay under it – the Android and iOS mafia boss will eventually come by with a fire hose and spray it on you anyway. “I still got you, sucker!” he will say. And then you still get all wet – even if you planned for the rain.
And I think that’s an example of the difference between and intelligent force that exists to cause you to get covered in the rain, versus a passive natural force like the whether that is indifferent. My proposition is that the Android and iOS duopoly has an intelligence of its own. I shouldn’t claim to know if thats a computer algorithm running amok or just some absolutely heartless rich person/people. If I had to guess, i would think it might be a little bit of both.
But because of that force being an active intelligence, we have to consider that from the moment each of us picked up our first Android or iOS device, they were plotting how to spray you with the fire hose if you try to get out from under the rain. They’re in the business of making it inescapable. If you made it “user-friendly” to escape, they would destroy you. They know where you live. They know where your children live. They know the romantic interest of you and your children. They control the social media feed going to your child’s mind. If you upset them, they can either poison your children against you, or poison your loved ones against you, or poison your child’s loved ones against you. And it’s all totally legal. It’s legal to record Location History of everywhere you go, and to program your machine to tell them the history.
We’re all in like some kind of prison like that, this zoo of modern humanity, created by following the rule that you can boil a frog if you do it slowly. If everything jumped from 2000 to 2025 in an afternoon, maybe everyone would have complained more successfully. I thought when I bought my Librem 5 it would solve the problem. I thought that by deciding to use this kind of phone, I would decide to make the problem go away in my life.
But that is incorrect and naive. The Librem 5, by default, uses publicly available software that you can audit. But it is also a known fact that you will not audit it because it is too complicated. As such, when using my Librem 5 I was able to determine that sometimes, decided on the whim of the device’s own code, it would send my location as frequently as every 5 seconds to some type of endpoint owned by Mozilla. Some folks here on the forum reported it. We were thinking… “Hey… what’s this? Why do most Linux distributions today do this by default? Isn’t that weird?” The volunteer moderator here on Purism forums even made a guide for how to shut it off, because if you don’t shut it off then using a VPN on the Librem 5 would be useless when dealing with the prying eyes of the nation states, because they could simply team up with Mozilla to get information about your IP from behind the VPN because the freaking code of all Linux machines sends them that information now.
And after we discussed the problem here on the Purism forums for a while, and folks were asking – heyyyy, why is this the default? – then Mozilla went and shut down the endpoint that we were referring to because apparently the whole point of why it supposedly existed was no longer important to them. But you know what I don’t know? To be honest I don’t know what Mozilla plans to replace it with. I’ve no idea. Perhaps they already did replace it with something. I do my system package updates, and I do them without reading the new code.
But on the Librem 5, the difference is that I was able to know that this location tracking of my device – where the device self-submits it’s location periodically to a third party – was happening at all. On Android and iOS, they would have not let me even know that this was happening.
So the Librem 5 doesn’t solve the problem. But it was made by people who wanted to allow the users to at least know that the problem exists. I get to know that I’m right to be paranoid. When I think that something seems bad, I get to know: it is bad. Something is very bad about technology today.
If you want to use a Librem 5, usually the problem isn’t actually the Librem 5. More often for me, the problem is that whatever I want to do was created in such a manner that I am not allowed to use a Librem 5 to do it, even though it would have been entirely possible to construct the software in such a manner that the Librem 5 could have done what I want to do, if the people writing the software had been willing to allow for that case.
So, isn’t it impossible to make the Librem 5 user friendly, because if you did society would change to to be unfriendly towards that?
And so I seem to be going in circles. Am I the cool-aid drinking Purism hardware user, who has confined himself to hypocritical and confused, paranoid ideologies that put Purism on a pedestal that stops me from using a phone that actually “works” in the eyes of most people?
Probably. But then I start to think, maybe life without using a phone that “works” is actually better! Life for my parents, from the age prior to phones, was really not so bad. If I have to choose between buying a paper atlas before I go on a long drive, or being constantly stalked by a villain who turns my family members against each other over the latest news headlines using a geographical record of our entire life travels from every minute of every day… I mean… geez. The paper atlas maps are actually not very bad. You can write on them with a pencil. Pencils are cheap. And to be honest, I still don’t use paper atlas maps often enough. I bought one recently, but, actually I haven’t been getting out much. Because even on my Purism devices, I end up using the freedom-focused layer at the bottom of the technology stack to eventually load up some non-free thing on top of all that, and then use the non-free thing to do my job or to entertain myself. And as a result, I still end up with some warped consciousness problem. I have not ever really won at independence from all this crap. But, sometimes the computers are a little bit closer to only doing what I want rather than simply doing what I want plus whatever they want.
So if you find information that creates proof in your mind that what I’m doing here is putting Purism on a nonsense pedestal, and that there’s a better way to live by using some other freedom-fighter phone that claims to “free you from big tech” better than Librem 5, while also being able to order lunch at the table with my friends at Chick-Fil-A instead of making me sit for 15 minutes to boot an android emulator just to try to get a sandwich, only to have the emulator boot about the same time that my friends finish their sandwiches that they already ordered – then let me know. Because to be honest, the Librem 5 has a camera app and it can automatically detect QR codes, and then I can instantly open web URLs with those QR codes, and visit the pages. Purism already built all of the technology for that. But Chick-Fil-A specifically designed their QR codes to only work on Android and iOS handsets, because they are OK with being evil. And that made it so that I didn’t get to have lunch, even though there are other restaurants who use web-based ordering systems that work fine on Librem 5.
And I think that’s a great example of why the “user friendliness” of these devices is often subjective and made up, and it’s made up in a way to favor the status quo devices that already exist. And I don’t really think that’s fake – to me that seems quite real.
But, I mean, if I’m wrong I guess I would really like to know.
Edit:
If you want to use a Librem 5 as your phone, here is my advice:
- Teach yourself Linux terminal commands. We are trained to believe these are hard, but they have advantages.
– The commandlsshows files in current folder
– The commandcd <foldername>opens a different folder
– The commandmv <source> <destination>moves a file. We can repeat the “source” part many times, and move all of a group of files into a folder
– The commandrm <file>deletes a file. There is no trash can, and it is gone forever, so you don’t really need to worry about someone else “finding” it (if you ever feel paranoid).
– The commandcat <file>prints the contents of any text file. This can be quite useful.
– The commandscp filename user@hostname:/path/to/destinationcopies any file from local computer to remote computer. So for me, my phone can beam up a file to any other device of mine, or any device can beam up a file to the phone
– The commandscp user@hostname:/path/to/destinationoperates in reverse, and can beam up any file from remote machine to the local machine
– The commandssh user@hostnameopens a terminal on the other device. So you can browse files and folders on your phone from your computer, or you can browse files on folders on your computer from your phone
– Using the above, and a few others, we can suddenly exist in a system with seamless file transfer from laptop to phone and back. You can puppet the phone from the laptop, or puppet the laptop from the phone.
– If you feel paranoid like me, and disable the remote login of the phone into the laptop, or of the laptop into the phone, you can have a third computer that you use as a go-between and have each of the end-user devices log into the go-between machine. You can do whatever you want. - I use DesktopEntryCreator from here: etheller/DesktopEntryCreator: A tiny GTK utility for creating .desktop files. - Codeberg.org
– This was written for me by an LLM.
– It is a piece of code that can choose (1) an icon, (2) a name, and (3) a code file.
– Then, when we press OK, an app with the corresponding icon and name appears on the home screen. Clicking that app runs the code file we chose.
– So you can ask a ChatGPT to write you an app, and have it reply with 10 lines of python code, then select that app with this “creator” and press OK and it becomes an app on the home screen. - Buy multiple Librem 5 batteries. I think at least 3 is a good number. Then you can buy $8 chargers on some online shipping company and charge the batteries for your phone even while they are outside of the phone. I do this, then I rotate batteries constantly, and as a result I never really have to set my phone down to charge. It can always be with me, and I usually have a couple of reserve batteries fully ready to go at any time. I go on 4 day vacations with 5 batteries and never charge my phone, even if the vacation is at a cabin in the woods with no electricity. The forums will tell you that the Librem 5 battery situation is worse than Android. For a couple of extra bucks for batteries and chargers, for me it’s way better than Android. I would have a hard time ever going back.
- All of the battery swapping that I do rips apart the back of the Librem 5, which constantly has to detach and re-attach. I went through 3 or so back plates from Purism until eventually Purism published the 3D cad files used to make the Librem 5 back. So I asked an LLM where I could order my own back plate from a fabricator. I told them to make me an Aluminum back plate so that I could rip it on and off but still have it be invincible. The nice human at the fabricator website told me that instead of a $300 aluminum backplate, I should order a $60 backplate made of Nylon11. So they shipped me a Nylon backplate 3D print for my Librem 5 and I’ve never looked back. It’s indestructable, and with a little bit of duct tape, I can rip it on and off of the back my phone three times a day for a year and it never rips or tears. (The Purism ones are made from molded plastic that is thinner so they end up tearing.)
- I use a 1 TB (terrabyte, which is 1000 gigabyte) inserted micro SD card in my Librem 5. This card is configured to have a bootable storage, so that I can dual boot the Librem 5 between its normal configuration, and a high-performance zram hack version that tries to burn out the chip at full speed, and runs a Waydroid android-app compatibility layer, which I have a hotkey to open at full screen. So basically if I power off my phone, and power it back on while holding Volume Down button, it enters into that (“bad”) mode for trying to fit into society. Then I launch Waydroid and it literally looks like an Android. I go to Google Play store and install the apps that our society forces me to install. After the zram gets loaded up from the first minute or two, the lag goes away and falls out and it just scrolls around as if it were an Android (most of the time).
- I have > 50 gigabytes of music, which can run for probably hundreds of hours, copied into my 1 TB micro SD card chip. So, whereas some people stream from Spotify, I can stream from the micro SD card. I have Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa and Sia and all the good musicians on there, whose music I obtained legally by buying CDs at the store down the road and then copying the CDs onto the card using a Purism laptop, so this is not an endorsement of any illegal downloads, which is not how I came by this music. I keep an unencrypted part of the card, so that it’s super easy to play the music even if I am running from the main Librem 5 hard drive instead of booting the SD card Android simulation mode.
- To play the music I use the
vlcapp. But how do I get apps? The “purism app store” thing doesn’t work, but it doesn’t need to. I use the commandapt install whateverto install an app namedwhatever, and it uses the Purism PureOS package management which is based on Debian. It’s actually as good as an app store, but it’s command line, so the common user doesn’t know it’s there. - You can get all kinds of other apps that way. One day I wanted to joke about gameboys, so I installed a gameboy emulator from PureOS using some
apt install virtualboyadvanceor whatever it was. Then I played the Pokemon for a couple of minutes, until it crashed, which is probably Purism’s fault somehow but I didn’t investigate why. - I usually keep the hardware switches off on my phone, and I do phone calls using computers. The Librem 5 phone calling function is throttled by CIA or new world order government or something, but PCs can take calls so it’s OK. In order to accomplish that, use a phone provider who does not base their systems on the premise of SIM cards and physical devices. Instead, just get a way to make calls through software. If someone is going to actually call you, they will probably tell you in advance. That way you can have the modem of the Librem 5 turned off, since cellular modems were bad anyways
Thank you for giving the Librem 5 a shot. I agree that documentation still needs a lot of work. This is even considering how many contributions I’ve made to the public documentation in the past few months alone.
I welcome you (and anyone reading this) to please feel free to:
- (for those of whom have the time/energy) provide merge requests
- (for those of whom do not have time/energy) create clear, concise, limited-scope issues
I contribute documentation with the perspective of already having daily-driven Linux for 15+ years; it’s natural to forget what is common knowledge and what is jargon. Newcomers may often feel like they have little to contribute, but their fresh perspective makes them invaluable.
We need you.
I don’t carry music with me, but I have about 50 gigabytes of bird sounds.
So, not birds singing (music), but other sounds they make - farts, burbs, wing flaps…? 