I touch the restart and immediately a list of “unknown process” es are listed, as if I should know what those are and that someone, me? should turn them off, before restarting the phone.
Some process don’t get closed properly sometimes, It happened to me a couple of times when I am about to power off.
To see what is opened I just open Usage app
And touch the apps currently opened. Then a popup window offers me two options: Force Quit (the app) or Cancel. I choose Force Quit .
I can Force Quit almost every app except:
System
Phone Shell
Phone Compositor
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When in doubt, I always like to use the terminal.
ps faux - This nice command will print out a tree of processes. That way, I can see what is running on there. On the little Librem 5 screen it might help to zoom out to see the tree printed by the f arg. Or you could just use ps aux. It’s really nice when we can see the full list of all processes on the system, but some people years ago made it there job to make more and more processes, so that no individual remembers what each of them does anymore. It’s unfortunate, but the day that they make a new version of librem 5 phones where I’m not allowed to list running processes like this will be the day I stop using them and move to some other more libre phone. [They’ll never stop us.]
Since process list becomes easily irrelevant from information overflow, I also like
sudo ss -tlpn and sudo ss -ulpn. The t and u are for TCP and UDP, and the l is for listening servers, so these commands list what running servers are on your device. I have an sshd server I installed, which would be bad (the world likes to try to spam login attempts to those), but it’s OK because I disabled password logon. Under udp servers, I also have avahi running. I don’t like avahi, since it’s used by the device to chirp and chat with the Mac devices on the LAN all the time in that Macintosh way invented by Macintosh people, but it’s there by default on all Librem 5s and GNOMEs and such, because having your device always chirp back and forth with nearby Macintoshes and their friends is useful sometimes if you wanted that feature. For example, it helps you identify printers even though to be honest I haven’t gotten printing working on my device because the place I often stay has a proprietary printer that rejects non-Windows users as far as I could see. But in theory, if you had a printer better than the one where I’m staying, having our device always singing to the nearby devices about where the printer is to create a collage of understanding would be useful, so because of that, there’s always avahi running.
If you take away the l in the two commands I listed above, then it will show outgoing connections instead of listening servers. I have the gnome-software which I assume is probably the app called PureOS store running on my Librem 5. And, then network manager is doing some outgoing thing on the local net to talk to the router, which is just part of its normal operation to make some noise and navigate the network space.
Because these commands I listed above are just showing a snapshot of activity, if you want to get all the activity, you can use Wireshark or tcpdump. For some reason my Librem 5 won’t launch Wireshark, though, which is a little bit lame. But we can still see a stream of all network packets going in and out of the Librem 5 if we install tcpdump using first sudo apt install tcpdump as a command, followed by the following:
sudo tcpdump -i any - This records all the traffic into and out of my Librem 5. When I first ran it, I noticed that even sitting at idle with no apps open, my Librem 5 was always contacting the amazonaws.com, and packets labeled Out were just zipping over there all the time. That was because in the 1980s after Stallman invented GNU to be a fully free as in freedom operating system, then folks created GNOME to be the GNU desktop, and then GNOME got co-opted by some other people who got convinced by Twitter to hate Stallman because he says we should use different words for rape and for prostitution (and thus that means he said either of those words publicly, which is awful) so then GNOME published on Twitter that they are not affiliated with GNU even though the G in GNOME stands for GNU. And while that was all happening distracting everyone over the last several years, someone made a patch to GNOME so that one of its dependencies always sends location information to the Mozilla Location Services Hosted By AWS. Then, Phosh forked from GNOME which means it inherited the dependency on a service that sometimes, at its discretion, will decide to upload information about your device (nearby WiFi names, nearby cell towers, etc, etc) to the Services so that it can guess where you are physically located in case if the GPS might not work (or, for example on a Librem 14 which also has this feature enabled by default, there is not a GPS so it just wants to know where you are).
So, unlike my Librem 5 where I shut this down, if you didn’t change the behavior your device might be sending location to the Services every five seconds. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it does not, at its discretion. So you might find that running too if you use these kinds of tools to review what the device is doing.
But unlike Android, you are allowed to know if that is happening and allowed to change it, so Librem 5 is still leagues and leagues better than the other stupid devices which not only have stupid defaults, but also don’t let you check the inner workings of the device.
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Gnome and Debian is not Libre(SystemD and More) anymore but Open and owned by Redhat through Fedora, so Gnu/Lnx Community don’t have the power of Gnome and Debian anymore because Redhat is control everything…
Gnome(G.2)+Debian(nonSystemD) was a dream for Gnu System, now Gnome and Debian it is a Ridiculous, Unfreedom clone of IOS Apple and abstract.
What are you talking about?
Debian is now owned by RedHat/Fedora???
Where did you read that and can you provide a link to the article?
Looking forward to it.
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For those that take their security seriously: I also like to output basic information about running listeners to a file, at a point in time when everything is good, so that I can easily verify whether
- anything that should be running isn’t (i.e. server crashed), or
- anything that shouldn’t be running is (e.g. software update increased the attack surface).
Neither do I. I don’t need it. I silenced it. Problem solved.
(While it may be about more than just printers, I must admit that I have never yet, after several years, had a need to print from my Librem 5.)
You can reduce spam login noise to a very manageable, low level by using a non-default port. (It’s true that eliminating password logon altogether is a stronger defence against a successful break-in, but that does nothing at all about “noise” i.e. you will still get the connections to the server - so both measures can be appropriate.)
?Is there any evidence that anyone, anywhere in the Linux ecosystem is now, or will in the future be, planning to do that?
One of the core aspects of a Linux phone is that you can be root - so you can do anything (but of course with great power comes great responsibility).
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Oh hey! I have a use case. 
My non-wireless-capable laser printer is upstairs in a closet. Normally when I want to print something, I carry a laptop upstairs, connect by USB to the printer, plug the printer into the electrical outlet, turn it on, and print.
This would be easier and faster with the Librem 5. It powers up more quickly than my laptops, is more handy, and can pull any document from my network via sftp.
Unfortunately, I haven’t got it to work yet. I think it’s a driver issue… or “operator headspace.”
(But this may be off-topic.)
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