Today, I got the Librem 5 Convergence features working in my home office. I used a Lemorele 10 in 1 USB-C hub from Amazon, two HP 25f monitors, and a generic keyboard and mouse. Here is what I found. To continue relying on the phone screen when using a big monitor at the same time seems klunky and inefficient.
1.) Only one external monitor works. If you hook up two monitors, you just get the same thing on both monitors. There is no selection anywhere to add two external monitors,only one external monitor.
2.) My expectations were that I would have a high resolution desktop not unlike my Ubuntu desktop on my pc. But no, you just get a low resolution phosh desktop. Initially, getting control of the desktop is difficult. Go in to Settings/Display, select “unknown monitor” and set it to 1024x768. The default setting is 240x480. You can’t do much with that. You’ll need the phone to select your apps since the phone screen is the only place you can find the application icons. So the phone needs to be an active part of your Desktop user experience. To set the phone aside and just use the monitor won’t work. But you can use the mouse to click on the icons on the phone and then drag the open applications from the phone over to the monitor. But at 1024x768, it is only practical to have one open program on the monitor at a time.
3.) After you get used to using phosh rules on your Desktop monitor, things start getting easier. Swiping up (using the mouse) to close programs becomes very valuable because on many programs, you can’t reach the x in the upper right corner to close them…
4.) I opened the weather program. It looked good but filled the whole screen on the big monitor. I opened the Libre Office equivalent of Ms- Excel. I was able to use it in the upper left corner of the spreadsheet only but could move the window right and left by click-hold while moving the mouse left and right. I found it difficult to get to the exit button because only the upper left part of the program was accessible to show up on the screen. Even a terminal screen is too far zoomed-in. You can use it. But just the bash prompt takes up almost half of the screen. Multi-tasking of programs is not feasible for efficient use.
5.) So my opinion is that convergence has a good start, but is not ready for prime time. Fixing the screen resolution to allow 1600x1200 and higher would be a good start. Also, I think that the phosh rules need to go away and be replaced by normal Gnome desktop rules, when a big screen is plugged in to the phone. I want to be able to set the phone aside and open the programs from trays or start buttons that are on the same desktop that the applications run from.