Hello everyone,
I’ve been using my Librem 5 as my only phone for 9 months and thought I’d share my feedback. Long story short: I love it. It pisses me off sometimes, but not enough to stop loving it. Many things got better during the last months.
TL;DR: I love love love it. It has quirks, but they are easy to go around and only manifest 0,01%. Most days, I even forget I am not using a non-mainstream device.
On the other hand, I can imagine a “plug-and-play” kind of person getting annoyed at it, unless it’s a person with very basic usage patters.
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How did I get to the Librem 5? I got really upset after finding out that my Cosmo Communicator was never going to get another update, and the Linux experience was subpar.
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My personal profile? Tech-savvy. I host my own email server from my home office (two redundant lines) and I am mostly concerned about my privacy. For work, I mostly use FreeBSD, but sometimes I need to boot Windows. But I never log into anything. For general web browsing, I use a coreboot ThinkPad X230 with Qubes OS. I don’t do social networks or linkedins or instafaces or facegrams or any of the sort.
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My usage profile? Light Web browsing, rarely a YouTube video, sometimes I listen to Podcasts and to online radios. Email. SMS and calls. Waydroid for my bank MFA and for Signal. I am usually on data, rarely on wifi (switch remains mostly off). I am a serious photographer, so I hardly ever use the camera and I am not the kind of person who goes littering the Internet with snapshots of my personal life. I do understand that some of the problems I am going to relate here are due to the nature of Linux and not something that Purism has done or not with the phone.
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What do I think? I love it. It does everything I need a phone to do, I enjoy the freedom of running whatever I want in it. It also helped me overcome my addiction to mobile phones. However, it is only for the tech-savvy or for the person who uses it for calls and web browsing. Intermediate users expecting an iPhone-like smooth experience will be disappointed.
Phone functionality: I have no issues with missed calls or SMS. Sometimes the data connection goes stale, but it is way rarer lately than it used to be. I can go weeks without any issues.
When I am on the phone, the screen doesn’t turn off, only goes blank. When I am in a call, I need to press the power button to turn it off. I’ve made very long calls, 2-3 hours, with no problems.
Sometimes it doesn’t wake up from suspend (the screen blinks very fast and goes back dark). I still don’t know what is the matter here. Sometimes it is not responsive when waking up, but in a few seconds I can see that the clock updates and the phone is back alive.
Sometimes the PIN pad does not respond, requiring a quick visit to the power button.
VERY BAD: In a high contrast scenario (when under the sun and with high contrast mode engaged), it highlights and keeps a circle around the numbers I’ve typed when unlocking the phone.
Battery life: I can spend the whole day out without any problems, doing basic online checks, reading an article here and there, making calls. HOWEVER, I must be very careful when I stop Waydroid to make sure it is really dead (sometimes I kill the service but it mysteriously remains), otherwise I will get back to a very warm phone and no battery. =( Also sometimes Waydroid suppresses standby, also killing the battery. I developed the habit of checking these things, but it is something that the average home user won’t do. =(
99% of the times it is just fine.
The new keyboard is nice (I need diacritics), but when used in landscape mode it covers the terminal and I can’t see the command I am typing. The out-of-box keyboard leaves one line visible.
The ugly: my 60MHz HP 712 workstation running nextstep 3.3 and 64MB of RAM is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster to operate than the Librem 5. I understand web browsers being a bag of bloat, given the current state of the web, but nothing justifies 3GB of RAM not being enough to do EVERYTHING ELSE with aplomb. I know this is not Purism’s fault, but damn… software is inefficient these days.
Apps I use:
- Phone, Chatty, Contacts, Calendar (using my personal DAV server).
- Never got MMS to work (but I didn’t try hard enough). My carrier publishes the settings in detail, so it’s basically my fault. Most settings are not available via GUI.
- Firefox, with extensions: AudioContext Fingerprint Defender, Canvas Fingerprint Defender, Consent-O-Matic, DDG Privacy Essentials, Mobile View Switcher, Port Authority, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin.
- I hate the flickering of the menus but overall it works ok.
- Authenticator
- Dialect
- Feeds
- after switching to the backpak, I can’t copy-paste from it and sometimes pages don’t break line at the width of the screen, pissing me off very much. It wasn’t a problem before, but I already lost all my feeds once (moving from package to backpak) and I am lazy.
- suuuuuuuuuper duper slow (python?)
- Geary
- I hate when I tap and it activates buttons that are on the background, otherwise fine for my basic mail needs.
- My girlfriend’s picture - I tap the picture and it calls her. Best feature!
- Maps
- Slow fixes aside, it does the job. I wish for something like OpenStreetMaps in Android. What an excellent application that one is!
- Podcasts
- Portfolio
- tap and touch friendly partial replacement to Files
- Pure Maps
- I don’t use it so often as to get around the interface and manage to actually build my trips. It is not very intuitive. But maybe I just need to learn how to use it.
- Shortwave - I love it. I discovered so many nice jazz radios there!
- Solanum - I love it.
- Space Launch - makes the space geek in me very happy.
- Terminal
- I hate when the keyboard covers it.
- Usage
- Why the heck is the Usage application saturating the CPU to redraw the charts? Damn, make it less smooth or give an option to set the refresh rate please. On the bright side, if you scroll down beyond the chart, CPU usage reduces.
- Waydroid - I love how well it integrates and how I can even have Android and native apps side by side in the app switcher. (need to remember to close them down properly though)
- Weather
- Wordbook
Apps I use on Waydroid:
- my bank’s MFA app
- Signal
- I made the big mistake of creating my Signal account on Waydroid, so now I can’t log into a Linux-native compatible client because I can’t take a photo of the QR code from within Waydroid. =(((
Apps I’d love to use:
- Files
- requires calling Terminal keyboard for ctrl commands because right clicking is not working.
- Foliate
- it always crashes when loading an ebook. =(
- Stream
- choppy, uses a lot of battery, slower than Firefox or NewPipe on Waydroid
- Web
- I prefer the interface to Firefox but it scrolls very slowly - I can’t stand it.