Hello. My wife and I are looking for secure, private, simple, functional phone/laptop for the basics+: web, email, video streaming, messaging, photos, et al. I write, using Obsidian and Ghostwriter. I’ll connect to an e-ink monitor/keyboard/mouse, she’ll most likely just use the phone. My questions:
Obsidian and Ghostwriter available on PureOS? If not, similar plain text apps?
Not proficient at Terminal, but do fine in Pop!OS after decades with Apple. PureOS seems similar. Thoughts?
Will my use scenario push the 4MB Ram (or 3 with the librem-5) too hard?
Experience with longevity of phone as daily driver?
Recommended case, or does it not need protection?
Does porting existing phone # to AweSIM lessen privacy?
PureOS and Pop!OS are both in the Debian family, so there will definitely be some similarities. However I have never run Pop!OS so can’t comment more specifically.
I guess so. For sure, it establishes a trail from your old phone to your new phone.
It could be a fairly severe trade-off though, depending on what percentage of your contacts are unwanted and what percentage are wanted.
If you mostly get spammed by businesses that you one time did something with then a new phone number could be a good thing. If you mostly communicate with a mass of friends then it’s going to be painful to change phone number.
If you are using a phone number for two-factor authentication then it could be quite painful to change phone number. For this reason I try to avoid 2FA via phone number and, wherever possible, only accept 2FA via either email address or TOTP (time-based 6 digit code).
I don’t think anyone else can really judge this one for you.
Changing phone number makes your mum slightly more vulnerable to the “Hi Mum” scam.
I think that’s a “no” right now.
I would recommend a case. There are a range of topics about a case in this forum. I think it would be great if Purism could offer a case as an optional accessory with initial purchase, just for those who are time poor.
Bear in mind that the source of videos may itself be a privacy compromise. For example, watching videos on YouTube is not great for privacy. On the other hand, if you are your own source then that privacy problem goes away.
Should work. GNOMEs text editor is preinstalled, it may also does the job you want.
Pop!OS looks a bit different (Phosh delivered by default), but Terminal should be similar. Should not be an issue for you.
3GB (not MB ) are enough to do all the basic stuff you mentioned. The OS takes 1-1.5GB and RAM can also be compressed. Personally I never run out of RAM, but you also cannot open endless amount of things.
It is one of the strongest points, even better than Fairphone. First devices came 2019 on market and it is very likely that they still can be used 15 years later in 2034. The quality of hardware is great, parts are replaceable by your own with a single common screwdriver. Just the black color of the case splinters off a bit (I only notice it when looking close to corners where I may hit something).
Depends on your personal preferences. Some people dropped the phone without breakages, others had broken screens. The metal case is also a good base protection itself, but cannot protect against everything.
About your last question: Batteries uptime. You have to babysit it a bit, because you are carrying a full featured computer in pocket size around and so it is not as optimized as Android or iOS in terms of energy consumption. Without using it the battery is running out of juice in 20h. That is probably the biggest downside.
And depending on your use case it may or may not be something bad: Android apps with Google services obvious do not run. Others may or may not run with Waydroid, but I have no experience with (don’t want to use those myself).
On the upside you can run most software that is available for Debian (and therefor Pop!OS). Just keep in mind that you are running an ARM64 processor, not AMD or Intel and that apps also need to fit into phone screen to be used comfortable.
Concerning Obsidian, it works but the font is blurry/pixelated and text input does not seem to open the keyboard. It’s an Electron application, at least for the pixelated problems there are existing workarounds by started the app with other parameters. But I’m not sure for the keyboard problems.
Please note I tested on Mobian, it’s possible you are not observing the same issues on PureOS.
Popos doesnt do snap, I use an ubuntu flavor and instead do some neutering to get rid of all of snapd but the repos still affect firefox and if I were to use it chromium browser; even with the firefox PPA installed and pinned I still sometimes have to manually install a deleted Firefox
Saw this thread and thought I might reply about my experience. I’ve shared my experiences elsewhere on the forums but I am having a tough time of it recently so maybe an interesting datapoint.
My Librem 5 arrived in March 2023. I was attempting to pilot using it to gradually move away from Android. (I’ve literally almost never used Apple other than Macintoshes decades ago. Never had an iPhone, so can’t compare to that.)
After 4 days using the Librem 5, I forgot the unlock code pattern to the Android and was subsequently locked out of it indefinitely with no recovery which I had not experienced before but I used it as an opportunity to force myself off the deep end and be a Librem 5 user with no other phone.
So it has been three years now. I want to share with you the feeling but it is to complex to share. We are at war for the sovereignty of our minds. One does not simply “buy a Librem 5.” Your mind is for sale and so once you buy a Librem 5 you will feel it is unusable because you are meant to believe it is unusable. What makes life fascinating and interesting about being a Librem 5 user, perhaps, is looking out at the world and realizing with technological understanding what parts of it are meant to make you believe the Librem 5 is unusable.
Can I do text processing with the Librem 5? Sure. I often use vim on command line on the Librem 5 to do many things with text, but I was already doing that on PCs since about 2014. There is also a plain text editor app, directly inherited from Gnome, and it works fine. It doesn’t ask me to log in or sync my contacts and data to do text editing like modern Windoze Notepad or Samsung Notes whatever.
Purism historically was going more in the eccentric FSF endorsement direction I think that System76. Lately I use a System76 keyboard with a Purism computer when I need a good computer. After having a Librem 5 with a dock and experiencing the nice but sometimes buggy “Convergence,” I bought a Librem 14 laptop as a frivolous purchase to support Purism. I got the high end specs with good RAM and storage. It has wholly become my daily driver for computing. I completely stopped docking the Librem 5 and using it as a low end “computer” once I had a high end computer that ran the same system and programs. And so the Librem 5 truly became my mobile machine, work pager, and hotspot for computing – and I forgot about using it convergently. I never use Purism Store app on the Librem 5 for updates, ever, as it always felt lagged and unfinished so I update and install apps through command line in the universal Debian sort of way with sudo and apt. Have you any experience doing that on PopOS?
Email is taken over by the corporations / technocracy. Librem 5’s email app was made for old time gurus and people who run their own email servers and I don’t. As a kid they taught me how to thunderbird but I was seduced by gmail webmail. So by the time I was on Librem 5, I was using Protonmail which is probably in bed with world order government but I think is at least isolating my data from Google specifically. You have to pay them and jump through a ton of hoops or something probably to get their email natively on the Librem 5 (maybe?) so I did not even try. I check the mail using web browser on my Librem 5 and it lags so badly really I prefer to just check email on PC. Within a few months as a Librem 5 user, I bought the 4GB bigger RAM version because I wanted the Librem 5 and I wanted to win the information war and so I figured I should “all in” my wallet on winning or else there was a chance I might not. It’s hard for me to tell if it actually makes a substantial difference, but the 128GB storage works wonders. You asked about streaming, I probably wouldn’t do a lot of that on the Librem 5 because sites like YouTube are technocracy so they work against you. If you watch a local video file or connect VLC to a streaming server natively the Librem 5 will play it just fine but if you connect to YouTube for example then Google decides whether your experience lags and they want you to use Android and iOS so they decide to make you lag badly sometimes. I think as months wore on it seemed like it got better, maybe a patch from Purism to better utilize hardware acceleration or maybe Google didn’t need to lag me anymore because it had failed and they didn’t trigger me to make the choice to stop using Librem 5. Am I being paranoid to imagine whether Google might do that? Sure, but it’s well within their capabilities and they won’t admit to me if they do. I’ve taken dozens if not hundreds of photos on the Librem 5, and videos. The quality is notably inferior to the $1000 Samsung that I had used since 2019 but that’s no surprise and I really enjoyed knowing there is no cloud backup. Nobody is looking at my photos but me. They are files on a standard file system and if I copy them to my other machines using standard tools then I have them on other machines. It mostly all is working OK but after recording a video there is a cooldown. The processor does some post processing on the video data sometimes for a long time before the camera app unlocks the button to take a new video, so back to back recording can be hard.
Yes I used the Librem 5 style now for 3 years! But during this time I had no phone case and I’m a dropper, I drop my phones a lot. The plastic of the Librem 5 is pretty sturdy. I ordered a spare of the high end Liberty phone so I had a backup phone, and used those since fall 2023. During that time the glued dried and the Liberty phone started doing this thing where the screen felt “squishy” IF and only if I am lying in bed holding the phone pointed at the ceiling at night, since in that configuration gravity can pull the unglued screen down to ever so slightly start to fall out of the phone. At some point I inserted two sided tape inside under the screen and the problem went away. In the meantime I switched to the backup unit without that problem. So I think in 2025 generally I used the one with the dried/busted screen glue and now in 2026 for a little while I’ve been back to the other one. But recently I dropped it and I have a screen crack for the first time in 3 years of Librem 5’s. The screen crack is fairly subtle and the device still works fine. You can order more screens on the Purism shop and install them yourself and I’ve been meaning to order but been lazy. In terms of hardware longevity, before the screen ever broke the first problem I experienced is a self-inflicted probably of energy greed. As mentioned by others, Librem 5 drains battery a little more like a PC. It’s not so much that it is strictly worse than an Android or iOS phone but rather I think it drains battery actively corresponding to processor utilization. So if you think about what you’re doing with it, you can influence battery drain. I personally liked to text and call over data using a service I was grandfathered into by my old Android. I can say more on that for your wifi call question but basically if all I need is data then I would kill-switch the modem or wifi and use them interchangeably and almost never in parallel. The modem drains battery far worse than wifi, so if I am often in one place not using the modem this saves energy. Also, “modern Linux” if you monitor you web traffic may at its discretion use the geoclue service to constantly determine your geographic location by submitting all nearby WiFis to a centralized service that outs your IP address regardless & through your VPN. This was called out as creepy/stupid for people who don’t often use GPS on the Librem 5 and subsequently, allegedly not related, the Google Cloud server that Mozilla was renting to suck up all this data was taken down. Now on newer versions of PureOS/Debian the default config file points to some other data vendor I’m not familiar with or to Google’s own location services as a disabled suggestion in the config, left up to you. I have a hunch that constantly reporting your location to these corporations may be an energy drain on an already power-constrained system so I generally kill it with the root access controls and manual edits to system config. Similarly, like how you can capture the name of all the nearby iDevices from apple on a plane that are always singing out their names on bonjour zeroconf almost all the time, the avahi service on almost all Linux devices wants you to be a zeroconf server and sings out your device name on any local wifis at some frequency in case people want to remotely log into your Linux device and for me this is also wasteful. My Librem 5 is my outgoing connection to the world usually, not an acceptor of incoming connections. So I have these spammy usages of network nuked and disabled and this might have improved my battery life more than other Librem 5 users, but I don’t need GPS or mDNS phone login (I can use paper maps and IP addresses). Despite all these efforts, my battery dies after probably at most half a day not a whole day. To remedy this, I have five Librem 5 batteries and numerous chargers and so when the phone gets down to maybe 40% battery, I can momentarily connect to charger, rip out the battery, put in a full one, then unplug charger and I go back to 86%-95% energy in the fastest fast charge ever – and the phone stays on. And this is the point of my ramble: the spamming of removing and inserting the battery quickly obliterates the poured mold backplate of these Librem 5s. But because they are an open hardware, you can download the 3D CAD file of the back of a Librem 5 from Purism. I asked ChatGPT and it linked me to a fabricator who 3D printed replacement backs for the Librem 5 that are some indestructable industrial nylon. The people at rhe fabricator were really worried these backplates wouldn’t fit but I ordered 1 and it was okay and then I ordered 3 more and the best of the 3 has always been a really, really perfect fit and has solved this problem for me for years.
I have used it without a case but with the indestructable 3D printed back mentioned above, and only after dropping it repeatedly for 3 years did I manage to produce a small crack in the screen. It still works fine anyway.
Don’t know. I’ve used an old system for texting & calling from web for years. This week my provider shut down the service and screwed me over so maybe I’ll be figuring this out soon, but I don’t know
I accomplished wifi calling from web browser. It was okay. I dont think the actual cellular calls worked on wifi, probably only modem. If you get a service like jmp.chat I hear those guys can do texting and calling from web/data but haven’t personally tried it yet
Usually in your first few calls on the Librem 5, you’ll forget to toggle the mic switch to physically connect & power the mic. This is user error but makes your friends and family think Librem 5’s dont work. So later when you realize calling works fine, it may be too late and you’re already getting laughed at
Since this is an information war against AI demons calculating how to make you give up your location and a record of your life, even if you’re like me and can be a holdout for 3 years you can still get attacked like how my cell provider cut me off last week. To carry over until I solve the problem I went and got the old Android with a big whole in the screen this week out of containment and I used it to type this message. It’s always a bit interesting how Android is a technology that “makes you want to use it.” The buttons are more flowy and have billions of dollars to optimize the feeling of smoothness. My device here from 2019 that is now 7 years old still has 8GB of RAM despite Librem 5 Liberty’s only having 4. Yet this Android garbage is way past any security updates, so I’m writing to you from a 0-day-vulnerable hellhole here. But it’s what my uncaring cell service provider wants because they only support the Android and iOS now.
It won’t be long now before the major companies like Google deploy an Agentic AI task force with an agent assigned to each user of these forums to follow that user’s breadcrumbs of data and target them until they stop using Librem 5s. The sheer idea that they could do that and that that isn’t a necessarily imaginary concept is absurd, and when your blood boils and you convince yourself that buying a Librem 5 was a marketing scam that got you and only iPhone is a real phone that works, remember my words and that it was a plan in advance that you would feel that way because your actions are monitored and your predicted future actions are for sale.
Other notes:
other people said you can’t get Google Play on Librem 5. Actually historically I was able to get it but I dont trust google, so I have dual boot using a 1000GB micro sd card. And on that card I have fullscreen Waydroid with GAPPS so it has Google play but it cant touch my main storage drive on the phone, so I assume Google will have a hard time getting my encrypted personal photos and other things
I have flown internationally with the Librem 5 and the 5 batteries and chargers and used them on trips. You can unscrew the back and change to a European modem but it’s important to be careful with the little wires when removing and adding different modem. I have broken a modem first time I did that, but Purism sells more for maybe like $80
As you may not know, Librem 5 it is a full Industrial-Grade Phone, so it is super supa longevity adn, however driverS not ready.
L5 it is first in the world True Autonomous device and Ghidra Phone capabilities.
Not all Librem 5 consume energy equally, some are more powersave. Sadly Gnu PureOS Mobile is FAT which need Ozempic to maximize energy and performance.
There are a lot unique thing that L5 can do than other phones just can NOT.
So no matter if is a fancy google pixels phoneS, just can not contra L5 Level.
To me Librem 5 it is a Unique and Dreamed phone never made before!
“snap is a dep for Firefox and Chromium” only in the sense that Canonical only provides Firefox and Chromium as snaps.
I’m not sure if Canonical was targeting “lazy users”, but Canonical decided that for users of some packages which required migration (e.g. browsers which required a migration of bookmarks/passwords/profiles to a place that snaps can read) they added debs like “firefox” that was
titled “Transitional package - firefox → firefox snap” which transitioned to the firefox snap.
Some users were confused and thought that they could use the firefox package to install
the non-snap firefox.
) are enough to do all the basic stuff you mentioned. The OS takes 1-1.5GB and RAM can also be compressed. Personally I never run out of RAM, but you also cannot open endless amount of things.
Phone capabilities.