which feature for you is necessary to use the librem 5 as a daily driver?
The phone is in a real alpha state and normal things won’t work.
What feature should be fixed:
Battery Life: 1 hour because there is no real power management? -> At least 1 1/2 days standby
Normal Phone Calls and SMS: Phone calls today not possible -> should work to evergreen batch!
More optimisation with bugs and apps: Not enough responsive stuff -> I think will grow in the next time
Front Camera: Not working -> For video calls necessary
Bluetooth: Free drivers would be the best, if not posibble add an other bluetooth module because the if you want to use proprietary drivers, your wifi will be tracked again to.
Wifi Tethering: To make a hotspot for all other devices
What we want to work on evergreen batch? Tell me! I add it to this post!
and 2. are really the only critical items on that list for me. I’d be happy with 10 hour battery life with the possibility of extending that via an external battery pack.
The camera and Bluetooth should work just because it would be downright embarrassing to release the final version of the phone with nonfunctional hardware. Ideally I’d like Purism to get Bluetooth Low Energy working, but I understand it’s a low priority compared to having Bluetooth working at all.
for me 1 is the most critical - an 8h battery life mostly idling for evergreen would be acceptable but not for Fir (this one i expect at LEAST 8h common use case)
2- most important. As long as it can’t be used for calls and text messages, it is not a phone.
1- I cant quote numbers, but this really needs work. Hopefully with high priority.
6- Bluetooth hands free for while I’m driving.
7- Basic camera integration. I don’t need video calls or selfies. Just to read qr codes. It is even acceptable if it works with zbarcam at the commandline. If there is a way to copy the result through the clipboard to the browser.
Oh, 6 actually yes, forgot about car and my pebble. so BT is a must as well. But not as high prio as 1. 2 is also not as high prio as 1 as long as there’s mobile data.
1 and 2 of course. I never use camera on the phone and Bluetooth is usually off. Wi-Fi is often off also except when I am at home because then I can use it for Internet connection through our fiber net.
They can handle it, it basically currently runs full steam ahead all the time, so there is plenty of kernel and userland work to do to reduce that. But in conversations with devs I get to hear that there is plenty of optimization potential.
Reminds me of the time I setup hackingtosh on a laptop that had a first gen core i7. After getting snow leaped finally on the machine it ran like a dog because the wrong kext was loaded. With proper drivers any device can run efficiently.
Well that’s not quite true… If I recall, the first gen raspberry PIs used a linear voltage regulator. I know the Arduino Nano uses a linear voltage regulator. These are simple regulators, cheap to produce, small, reliable, and terribly inefficient. No software fix can make them not suck. If you want to do anything power efficient with the Arduino Nano, you de-soldder the linear regulator and do something else for voltage regulation.
Good news is the L5 shouldn’t have anything akin to that issue, as it wasn’t designed with cost cutting as the only criteria.
Evergreen should have all these work. Otherwise, it’s terrible optics and will diminish the funding and launch of next gen or v.2
Now , what I could live with / without?
Basic phone functions are a must and better be flawless
Nobody wants to live with battery anxiety. It has to have at least 14 to 16 hours of light use. Few hours of talk, 1-2 hrs browsing, 1-2 audio streaming, 1 hr video. And this I would unacceptable by any other OEM - Wouldn’t pay a $100 for it. At least I could rely on the battery swap, so I could live with it.
long distance video calls keep one.with fam and kids.much closer personally, can’t live without for long. Maybe a month or so.
Wired headset gets in the way when working out. Noise cancelling in cars and trucks is superior on BT. Also,.could go without, but only for a brief period.
bugs are ok as.long as the phone gets the job done.
To be more specific phone (audio) calls are important and especially reception in areas with low signal strength is critical. But I have problems with all phones in that respect. It seems that all are made for city life with close base stations.
Battery life is the other important feature but in a vehicle the phone can be connected to the battery of the vehicle. Earlier phones had the possibility to attach an external antenna too which unfortunately is missing in recent phones. I work alone in the forest in winter and connection is quite important. It is useful to have BT too because I have BT in the helmet.
The front camera I have used once during all these years and the back camera a few times mainly to read QR codes. I carry a REAL camera (Nikon AW130 rugged compact) with me all the time so I have no need for the phone camera.
Internet connection is useful with browser and terminal app to my home computers. And at home WiFi is useful. The possibility to put my own Linux programs into the Librem 5 is something I look forward to. It will make a big difference because now I have to rely on Android apps to get things done and I do not like them. But I think I have to learn how to make the smart phone to work together with my home computers. This possibility I did not have until now (soon).
I also look forward to using native Linux apps I can compile if need be for the phone, and interoperability with my laptop/desktops. I had this with apple some time back but the apple culture really turns me off so I grew out of it.
