What are the things you wish you knew when you setup your Librem 5 the first time?

Hardware Librem 5
4

  1. When I attempted to dismantle the phone with a screwdriver for fun to prove I can, believing that I would not damage it, I discovered that the M.2 style modem and wifi cards in the back – although it is very cool that they are removable – are held on by wires that need to be removed carefully. If you pull on the wire until its connector comes off of the modem / wifi card – without care for how much you pull to make sure it comes off – in my case it sometimes rips off a little tiny part of the modem with it instead of detaching normally.

    …Then you have to buy another modem. The Librem 5 is awesome and so that’s totally a thing you can do, but it’s a little sad to need to do that. I put a new modem in mine and now it works fine again.

  2. People say Librem 5 battery doesn’t last long enough. But you can order more batteries, buy a $10 battery charger from Jeff Bezos or maybe from someone less villainous, and then rotate batteries. If you remove the battery while a Librem 5 is running, as long as the Librem 5 is connected to power it does not damage the device. As a result, you can take a Librem 5 while it’s still on, plug it into charger, pop the battery out, pop a new full battery in, disconnect from the charger, and walk away and have Librem 5 at 90% battery ready to go despite it being about to die seconds before. If you create a habit system of doing this, you never have to plug in your phone, it’s probably better than fast charging or long battery life. When on the go you can bring a battery and swap by powering off and on. However, extensive battery swapping will cause the backplate of the Librem 5 to eventually rip apart due to its being molded soft plastic. Ordering a 3D printed version of the backplate file – a file public provided by Purism in the spirit of open hardware – can get a backplate that is indestructible and will not tear apart.

  3. On rare occasions it will stop receiving text messages due to a programming error. Don’t fret, it’s not the end of the device, just go into command line with the Console / Terminal app and use sudo mmcli -m any –messaging-list-sms and it will show a few messages stuck as receiving mode with a number per message. For example it might be 4 and 5 in this status. In such case, then run sudo mmcli -m any –messaging-delete-sms=4 for 4, or the same with 5 for five, and that will kill the stuck messages. Then after a few minutes it recovers and everything starts receiving again. I also like to use an SMS provider that snoops on my texts and receives a second copy of the messages to their server independent of the Librem 5, so that I can log into that (even via the Librem 5 in a browser) and check for any missed messages. But usually only MMS is missed with my provider and not SMS.

  4. When the phone rings, instead of immediately answering, enable the mic/camera switch so that the other side can hear you talk – don’t just answer the phone. You’d be surprised how much previous phones don’t train us to do this.

  5. Social Media and the people are almost a conscious system. When you use Librem 5 as your only phone instead of Android or iOS, the conscious system will try to hurt you. It helps if you have an in-person friend or two who also make the switch to Librem 5, and if you have lots and lots of money. In my case, after four days trying to use the Librem 5 then I forgot my unlock code to my Android and had all the backups disabled, and got stuck in trouble mode fighting uphill to seriously use my Librem 5 as my phone since I didn’t have a fallback anymore.

  6. In my case the hard drive 32GB always seems to get full. My solution was eventually to buy a Librem 5 Liberty machine where I burn money for a version with 128GB storage, and larger 4GB ram. The larger storage is very readily apparent - I have never filled it up, floating between 60-80GB for years.

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