I flew to the UK (for my work) with a librem 5 trying to being somewhat minimalist but I always had my librem 14 also. I’ve tried to be a Librem 5 enthusiast to the fullest extent I could manage but I am, at times, a hypocrite. I have hesitated to really discard old hardware, and then I end up with too many things and too few good things. (At this exact moment, I am writing to you from a viscerally corporate spyware device. However much bad you think it is, it is a worse device than that.)
I spent most of my time in the UK in London. So I don’t know how things were outside of that. Even after changing my modem to an E1 broadmobi by physically unscrewing the modem cover and changing it, it seems like getting signal on a Librem 5 can be rough compared to the experience I think the other people are getting on their other phones. After using the Librem 5 as daily driver phone from 2023 until 2026, during my 2026 london trip I bought a cheap garbage android from Argos. The android is not good, and even as a former android user I would not recommend using it. In a few rare instances it gets bettter signal with the same SIM cards as the Librem 5, but if I put it by the wrong side of my bed where the signal wouldn’t read then I would miss work calls just the same (ouch!).
When I say that I was daily driving a Librem 5, that’s not entirely true. I ordered multiple librem 5’s and this most recent time that I went to the UK, I had with me 2 other Librem 5 units to use as chargers and 5 total Librem 5 batteries. This way, the unused units were always at home charging batteries while I was on the go with the Librem 5 and two full spare batteries that I could swap to for additional energy. That also meant flying with 2 or 3 Librem 5 chargers. You can buy “generic battery chargers” for $10 online in the US that can also charge Librem 5 batteries and I also flew with a handful of those, but unlike Librem 5 chargers they dont come with UK wall adapters out of the box and due to my other personal stuff I ended up not wanting to use up adapters on them.
Even with a fleet of three total librem 5s, two always charging and one in my hand, I would have problems like the aging Librem 5 starting to fall apart and then I rotate to the other one and use it instead as my daily driver. Two of the three were Liberty Phones so I only ever used Liberty Phones as the daily driver, because I wanted the 4GB of ram. If you think about it, if you are in the AI apocalypse watching the world burn fighting for your freedom, what’s a few thousand bucks if there’s a chance the extra RAM would keep you fighting a little longer instead of giving up?
Surely you understand that today’s systems are extremely corporatocratic. Even coca-cola cans were invented by a team of engineers to make that hissing sound so other people around you will decide that they should buy one too. The ocean of social cues to make you act in line is very large. I like to think that it is possible all of the other people who aren’t using freedom technology have their thoughts and minds for sale, and so it seems plausible that if you start using only freedom technology and cut out the surveillance machines from your life, the thoughts and minds of the people around you will be sold off to switch into attack mode to change your behavior back. I lack specific evidence for this – I have only anecdotal evidence – so you could easily decide that what I’m saying is conspiratorial and totally be living with the common accepted public narrative. That’s fine if you choose to do that, but I’m just sharing. Someone on Purism forums once said that people treat you a lot nicer if you pretend that your phone is old and no longer properly supported, rather than if you tell them it was designed not to work how they think it should in the first place by admitting to using a Librem 5. But I’m a bad liar. Instead I tell people I’m using the Librem 5, eat it when they tell me to stop, and then… at some point I just started telling people:
I really like this phone because it doesn’t work.
You’d be surprised how pleasant your life would be if your phone didn’t work.
Of course what I am saying in those instances isn’t strictly, literally true. If you could open a portal through time and hand my 6-year-old self in the early 2000s a Librem 5 instead of a Gameboy and teach him how to use it, it would have been extraordinary. It would have been like magic. But the iPhone Duo users would say the same thing about their phone as well, so maybe that’s a low bar.
This guy is on-point. Whether it lags varies based on a ton of factors. It’s more likely that if you invest a large amount of time you can mitigate those factors, whereas maybe on an Android or iPhone if it lagged there would be nothing you could do about it.
The lag doesn’t really totally make sense. I work in the software industry and I will probably lose my job to AI: supposedly software is a solved problem now and the ever-flowing AI agents will grant us infinite software. Yet, for some reason, if I play a complex 60fps animated 2D video game that I hacked together in 2013 in a dorm room – and I run that game on my Librem 5 – it basically runs flawlessly and only marginally lags if I make thousands and thousands and thousands of little spaceships with unique hit points, sprites, combat abilities, and whatever else. But if I open a web page, and write you a message on these forums on there, there’s a risk it might lag really badly and I might get bored and stop using it before I finish writing a post. (Obviously the modern web is a consequence of society and not of flawless engineering.)
Some might say I’m rambling a bit in text form but I’m hoping that by sharing I can offer you one random guy’s real perspective. The reason I bought the Android at the Argos wasn’t actually that anything was physically wrong with the Librem 5, but that I missed a meeting because Microsoft wouldn’t let me join a teams call and I felt guilty about it. Later I found out that if I had been practicing and ensuring things were configured correctly more often, there is a way to log into teams on the browser and get in the call on the Librem 5 and I even did a call with someone from work where it worked and we could talk that way. So it’s user error as the reason to buy an Android, not something strictly wrong, but I haven’t managed to discard the thing because it’s rather addictively fast response if I start web browsing on the Android, and also the SMS delivery folks always deliver to the Android where as things occasionally go into the void and don’t receive on the Librem 5. This is probably happening because some other folks at Google or wherever probably stalked people like us, found that we were using Librem 5s, and then invented some new technology called RCS that they new Librem 5s wouldn’t use so that they would know we have to buy a new device. Maybe if that bothers you, you could ask an AI to make RCS work on your Librem 5??? Also, if I use the Librem 5 as a hotspot they allow me access to the full internet, but when I used the Argos Android as a hotspot some protocols and systems couldn’t reach the outside world, so I think having a good/real device like a Librem 5 is much preferred in my life. Sometimes you really want the internet, and want to use your phone as a hotspot, with nobody barring your way. It seemed for me that Librem 5 continued to be a more reliable way to do that, whereas I’m not really sure what’s going on with Android now.
What none of that says – focusing on what you lose like that – is to speak of what you gain. The idea of convergence was a fun gimmick for me for the first year. Then I bought a Librem 14 that I wasn’t sure I would use, because I wanted to throw money at Purism and support them for making the Librem 5. This is where the cracks in the convergence theory start to show. Because the Librem 5 and Librem 14 systems are legitimately nearly the same software ecosystem, any time that I could bring a Nexdock and plug a Librem 5 into it instead I could just as well bring a Librem 14 – using the same amount of backpack space – and have a user experience that is not worse in any way (if the L5 hotspot is on) but which is better in several subtle ways. That’s how I became a Librem 14 user and it reinstated the phone/laptop divide in my life as one of hardware physical scale – I/O into the world – instead of how corporatocracy wants us all to believe that it was ever reasonable for there to be a software divide there. (“You need a phone for this app” or “You need a PC to run that program.”)
This blows a hole in modern computer security. It’s like the guy wearing the glasses in They Live. Modern computer security professionals teach us that 2FA is the solution to security. Because your phone and computer are two different things, you can use your phone to unlock your computer.
But what if your computer is allowed to ssh login to your phone and remotely run programs? The whole concept of 2FA is a joke. All your factors have proper credentialed access to act on your behalf, or they do not. If they do, then you probably want them to be able to log in to your other factors, and if that is the case then compromising one means compromising them all. Or you could be more paranoid like me and avoid SSH server on the Librems and use them both as I/O devices into the world, but then logically they both should be able to unlock something that requires 2FA login access – to be the second factor.
I ended up mostly using command line on the Librem 5. I carried it as a quick ssh terminal into my files and the world. The primary encrypted hard drive stores my photos, and the dual boot SD card is 1TB in size and has Waydroid to pretend to be android so if I’m caught in a pinch and need to pretend to have an Android for an Airport security or something, given 20 minutes to boot Waydroid I can make the Librem 5 pretend to literally be an Android without allowing the Android ecosystem access to the encrypted primary hard drive. Since it’s already a flagrant violation of anything I would use if I were ruler of the world, the Waydroid container on the dual boot literally has Google Play and the ability to get those official apps that way, and that SD card is not encrypted so it’s all just junk and I have to remember it’s a big security nothing burger of data leaking.
But, where possible, I much prefer to use SSH tunneling from the Librem 5 back to the US where I remotely pilot an Android that isn’t on-device when I need to do Android 2FA for my job. My Android in the US is on a cloud server in a VM and is always running, so it doesn’t take 20 minutes to boot like the on-device Waydroid, which makes it moreso actually usable. Especially if I break down and just connect to it from a Librem 14, where the remote UI works a bit better (the one I use was not properly adapted to mobile).
The end result is a phone I can trust. I can take my clothes off, turn on the Camera/Mic physical switch, point it at myself and take a naked picture and then go share it with my doctor and have extremely high confidence that I won’t get an advert next week about the contents of that picture – because it wasn’t sent to the cloud.
I have paper maps in my car, although they say that on my 1TB SD card if I wanted to I could download the maps of the entire globe and then have my Librem 5 give me navigational directions entirely on device, and I just never bothered to set it up.
And remember, the only situation where a Librem 5 legitimately fails and burns the users badly is when you take the uSD or SIM card in and out of the device while it’s powered on. I rotate SIMs a lot between US and UK sim, because my US sim that was supposed to be international has shoddy service in the UK for some reason unless I put it in an Android (and the UK sim doesn’t). And every time I rotate the sims, I have always removed the battery from the device first. Because they say there’s an issue with Librem 5 that shorts and kills your SIM otherwise.
Another note: I ordered a Lapdock from Purism but it was a few years before they got inventory and shipped it to me. I ordered allegedly the same product from Nexdock website and it shipped in two weeks. However, the Purism one has no wifi/bluetooth and the Nexdock one doesn’t let you turn off wifi/bluetooth, so I actually feel much better about the one from Purism now that I have it. But having a laptop shell like that eventually led to me buying a linux mini PC, even though Purism’s Librem Mini always seems to be out of stock. And the mini PC has been really seductive for me since it’s using a less free operating system, and has all the creepy stuff like Intel ME running and watching me, unlike the Librem 14, and so as a result the mini PC tends to run faster and have better specs. It’s important to know your computing needs if you want to be minimalist instead of just buying the best you can manage and then keeping it for a long time to cover as wide a net of needs as possible.
Good luck!
