I asked a master student in philosophy who uses a Fedora GNOME laptop and an Android phone as daily devices to provide feedback on using PureOS Crimson for the first time.
I flashed PureOS Crimson on the Librem 5, and unlocked it once so the disk encryption was done already, furthermore the system was vanilla.
Here the feedback:
- You have to press “Unlock”.
Explanation by me: On Android, you just have to press your pin code to unlock, there is no need to press a “Unlock” button after entering your pin code. - Nice welcome-screen (that has arrows but can also be swiped) and “walk-through” (“Librem 5 tour”).
- Cool kill switches on the side.
- I like the quick settings.
- Torch is not very bright (quite yellow).
Question by me: Would it be feasible to replace the led with a brighter, whiter led in a possible upgrade of the Librem 5? - I really like the smoothness of the “quick settings”-toolbar.
- You can scroll through the overview of apps/home-screen (very nice).
- You can revisit the Librem 5 Tour at anytime.
- Nice “show all apps / show only mobile friendly apps” function.
- Little bit confusing to leave an app / go back to to home screen, but I figured it out now.
- Firefox didn’t open on the first try; just a loading screen and the it “crashed”? But now it’s working.
Remark by me: Firefox takes quite long to start, the Firefox window with the spinner disappears, but Firefox is not started yet. This gives the impression of a crash. In reality Firefox starts a few seconds after the the spinner disappeared. If you click the Firefox icon in this time frame again, it looks like Firefox started only after the second try. - Everything is quite slow; browsing on Firefox (“woolly pigs” on DuckDuckGo) takes quite long.
- Keyboard does not automatically pop up when you save a file and want to name it, for example. Nor close automatically (which I understand, but it does take some getting used to).
- Nice that dark mode works too.
- Hard to get to the empty / regular desktop? (made it a pig background
).
Remarks by me:
- The user decided to take the Librem 5 Tour and learned about how to use the Librem 5.
- Some issues are might be solvable, maybe some are solved already upstream (like Firefox “not starting”).
- Quite some positive feedback.
- Overall slowness is mentioned.
- In general she got quickly used to the interface (except on how to show the empty home screen), for which I also recently learned you can show this by “pressing” the <Esc> key.
Maybe I will ask others for feedback like this as well, also maybe for more use that just “on-boarding”.