I have a Librem 5. It's currently collecting dust in my closet.
I was enticed by the idea of having a user-replaceable battery (my last phone upgrade was 100% motivated by battery life problems). However, the Librem 5's battery is basically as bad as my Google Pixel's was after degrading for several years. The evening I opened it, I set it down after tinkering with it for a little bit and came back the next day to it at 1% battery, with a notification saying "Your laptop will shut down if you don't plug it in soon". Typically, I'm used to mobile devices using extremely low amounts of power when you're not using them for anything at all.
It's also extremely slow--I figured that it wouldn't be as snappy as a flagship phone but I was surprised to find out that video playback (or, at least, YouTube in Firefox) is basically unusable. That's basically a non-starter for me.
I'm hoping to find something fun to do with it (I don't expect to get refunded, nor do I think anyone else will or should pay $600 for this thing) but haven't come up with anything yet.
It would have been helpful to specify the time when you had that disappointing experience with the Librem, and then put in the closet. At least for PinePhone, going to 1% within a day was a flaw of very early software, and good hibernation settings were released years ago already.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend the current Linux phones. Years after I got my PinePhone, the experience still pales compared to my old Nokia N900. I wonder if the lack of a physical keyboard discourages hacking. (Yes, a keyboard was released, but you have to order it separately and it has been reviewed as clunky.) Moreover, sometimes I wonder if the tough economy of the last decade has put a lot of idealistic people, who might have hacked FOSS in days of yore, into the precariat and there are just fewer man-hours available for mobile-Linux progress.
> good hibernation settings were released years ago already.
As long as you don't mind not receiving notifications (unless originated from an IRQ from the modem, assuming it didn't crash itself during hibernation), and if you don't mind not using tethering with turned off screen.
"Good" is very, very relative, especially when it comes to the PinePhone software.
The pinephone keyboard is nice, I don't think it's terribly clunky IMO (and I have had an N900), although it would have been even better if some of the control keys were shoulder buttons.
I have three PinePhones... somewhere... for mostly the same reason. A BraveHeart or two and then one of the "stable hardware" versions which fixed a couple near-showstopper bugs on the BHs. It didn't matter - the software simply never showed up, even running nightlies of various stuff never got telephony, the entire point of a cell phone, working stably on US carriers with battery life over 4-6 hours (be that screen on or off time, it didn't seem to matter).
I generated a bunch of e-waste trying to make Fetch (Linux Phones) happen. Never again. I'll just deal with the ever-more-restrictive-and-creepy duopoly until eventually I'm able to stop using smartphones at all and go back to a dedicated GPS or two, a dedicated music player, and LTE tethering a laptop if I need to look up anything. It'll be inconvenient, but I don't see another usable path out of the creepware spiral.
Yeah, proprietary modem firmware written by amateurs who do stuff like system("echo %s > /dev/ttyGS0", msg_var) to write to devices is not rock stable. Who would have thought.
Nightlies are unstable by definition, btw. It's some autogenerated build nobody normally tests.
Purism acknowledges that battery life is abysmal. The phone has two modes: Idle and Standby. Idle supposedly gives 10h of battery and Standby gives 20h but no mobile data, no wifi, and no alarm.
>I'm hoping to find something fun to do with it (I don't expect to get refunded, nor do I think anyone else will or should pay $600 for this thing) but haven't come up with anything yet.
You could recoup some of the cost on the second hand market, from a cursory glance, for $400 you could find a buyer fast.
There probably are, but this comment highlights the problem with OSS. Many people want a phone that just works for a full day, without needing to tinker with settings.
Maybe the default settings for Libre 5 are bad? Maybe the software can be improved to improve battery life?
> Did you check if there are background processes draining your battery?
These kinds of problems are often not background processes, but instead parts of the hardware which haven't been powered off or power gated correctly; even a small leak of a few mA could be enough to drain a battery much more quickly than the user would expect.
I also got one and was pretty disappointed, so it has been left sitting on a shelf. I didn't fully understand what I would be getting. The software is unstable, in particular sometimes the app store equivalent just doesn't work.
I really wanted to support the ecosystem outside of the existing duopoly but it just feels too unpolished and limited.
Tried figuring out how to setup a development environment but it didn't seem like it was possible on macOS or the instructions were too inaccessible for me to penetrate.
The hardware kill switches are a neat feature but I don't actually have a strong use case for them, and I'm not a big enough enthusiast.
Honestly, I'm wondering if it would be more effective to buy up some mainstream phone and sell modded versions of it with kill switches. If I had a strong desire for a phone with kill switches I'd probably hire someone to mod an existing phone, rather than build one from scratch.
You don’t need to use the app store. You can just SSH into the device and run the usual apt commands from the command line. Yes, this is obviously nothing the general public would ever do, but we are on a news for nerds site here.
> buy up some mainstream phone and sell modded versions of it with kill switches
Making the connections for the several different kill switches (cellular, wifi, microphone) on a phone whose form factor was not expressly designed for that, would probably result in a rather ugly-looking hack. Moreover, on the PinePhone at least, the cell modem is separate from the wifi chip, so you can kill one while leaving the other on, but I believe that on most phones they are part of the same SoC.
I have a hard time understanding how regular people in need of "security/privacy" would pay 1200+ USD for this device. I'm not even touching on specs etc. The only ones I can think of needing such "security/privacy" would probably make a great sidestory in Breaking Bad or get their own post-mortem show on Netflix.
Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.
P.S. For comparison the (somewhat) similarly spec'ed PinePhone costs 150-200 USD.
> Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.
Much of that cost went into Linux driver/app/phosh development. It made libhandy happen, which become libadwaita. Future Linux-based mobile OSes will be able to stand on the shoulders of all that.
So it’s really more of a donation, plus I got a Linux phone on top of that.
Besides, if I’m lucky and the hardware and battery last long enough, I’ll be using the Librem 5 as a daily driver for a decade, which would help amortize the cost even more. During those years, I won’t have to worry much about software obsolescence. All the drivers have been mainlined into Linux so I’ll always get to use the latest kernel version – even if something happened to Purism.
I could have written this same comment in 2008 about my OpenMoko. It certainly did some useful low-level work (especially when Maemo/Meego/etc. increased the importance of standardisation), but its biggest own-goal was repeatedly throwing away the user-facing stuff (jumping from GTK, to EFL; when QtMobile/Qtopia was actually the most usable!).
Still, that did last me a decade; although I replaced it with a PinePhone rather than a Librem ;)
People in need of security and privacy would be far better off with GrapheneOS. For the Breaking Bad crowd there are specialized crimephones like Anom that are pre-compromised by law enforcement. Librem is more for people who want to run traditional GNOME/KDE on a phone instead of Android.
I pre-ordered mine in May 2019. I asked for a refund in August 2020, and again today. Here is their response:
---
First of all, we would like to thank you for your patience and for your
support. We do acknowledge that things take longer than we all want and
we apologize for any inconvenience.
Sadly, we do not process any refunds at the moment (not just
pre-orders), but we do offer two other options which may be ok with you.
One is to get the phone which you have pre-ordered (we could ship it
within several business days). Another is to receive a store credit +20%
gratitude on top of the amount paid.
As I do not have any timeline for the refund all the information I
currently have indicates it will not be processed any time soon. I'm
very sorry and wish I had a better answer for you.
---
Yep. Open source the OS and allow sideloaded applications for folks who draw the line somewhat differently for where to trade off "dumb" vs "smart", and the LightPhone would be a winner, but alas...
I met someone in Bellingham with one of these things once. It was pretty sweet, and they'd explicitly cited their having culled their smartphone addiction with it as a selling point, so I guess it works to some degrees. I forget off the top of my head exactly which feature I wish it had that I wanted to sideload on, but whatever.
I'd like to know what percentage of people who bought this are using it as their smartphone? I heard the battery life and hardware quality isn't great.
Battery life is not great but manageable. I bought two spare batteries as backups. I charge the phone at home, and put it into suspend when I’m on the go.
Battery life may even improve as software and drivers mature.
Build quality is very decent. Hardware performance is barely enough for web browsing. But you get used to it quickly.
the convergent UI is actually great. (i own a librem 5.)
my keyboard, mouse, and speakers are connected to my monitor. i connect the phone via a single USB-C cable. suddenly i have full-blown gnome, exactly as i would on a desktop PC or laptop. applications and the launcher return to their normal, desktop layout when using the desktop mode.
it's "just plain old linux with gnome" as long as it's connected to your peripherals, only going into a custom UI when you go mobile. much like the steam deck, but without the clunky "switch to desktop/gaming mode" transition.
the oomph is obviously a little underwhelming but it's enough for lightweight development or (non-video) web browsing.
i haven't had success with calls or text messages (verizon and t-mobile), though. i want to like the librem but i haven't been able to actually use it as a phone.
I'm doing the same thing with my Pinephone; it's my "daily driver" phone, and also my main computer. It came with a USB C hub, but I could never get the power-passthrough to work, so it couldn't be used for long periods. I got a different hub, and a more powerful PD plug, and now it works fine (I also use a udev rule to bump the input current limit to 3A, since it sometimes chooses 0.5A which isn't quite enough to charge).
I agree about Web video: I've dug up some old youtube-dl scripts, updated them to yt-dlp, and now watch videos comfortably in VLC. I used to fetch videos automatically from YouTube's RSS feeds, rather than visiting the Web site "manually"; I haven't resurrected that yet (assuming those feeds are still published?).
Convergent tech has been something I've wanted to work well for ages - I remember trying a Samsung Note and Linux on DeX, but it never really worked well. I see from a quick Google it's long since dead. It's likely the only thing that would prompt me to even think about moving from iOS.
If it was anything like the Purism refund situation featured on Rossman's yt channel, their wording was actually that, "you can request a refund once we reach your position in the shipping queue", and not that they would actually grant the refund.
Readit News
I was enticed by the idea of having a user-replaceable battery (my last phone upgrade was 100% motivated by battery life problems). However, the Librem 5's battery is basically as bad as my Google Pixel's was after degrading for several years. The evening I opened it, I set it down after tinkering with it for a little bit and came back the next day to it at 1% battery, with a notification saying "Your laptop will shut down if you don't plug it in soon". Typically, I'm used to mobile devices using extremely low amounts of power when you're not using them for anything at all.
It's also extremely slow--I figured that it wouldn't be as snappy as a flagship phone but I was surprised to find out that video playback (or, at least, YouTube in Firefox) is basically unusable. That's basically a non-starter for me.
I'm hoping to find something fun to do with it (I don't expect to get refunded, nor do I think anyone else will or should pay $600 for this thing) but haven't come up with anything yet.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend the current Linux phones. Years after I got my PinePhone, the experience still pales compared to my old Nokia N900. I wonder if the lack of a physical keyboard discourages hacking. (Yes, a keyboard was released, but you have to order it separately and it has been reviewed as clunky.) Moreover, sometimes I wonder if the tough economy of the last decade has put a lot of idealistic people, who might have hacked FOSS in days of yore, into the precariat and there are just fewer man-hours available for mobile-Linux progress.
This is with no SIM, just wifi. Kernel is 6.3.0-1-librem5 on PostOS 10 (beryllium). GNOME 3.38.5.
The battery life has been like this since I received it in March 2021.
"Good" is very, very relative, especially when it comes to the PinePhone software.
You can still use whatever bluetooth keyboard you have on hand. I don't think that's a serious issue.
I generated a bunch of e-waste trying to make Fetch (Linux Phones) happen. Never again. I'll just deal with the ever-more-restrictive-and-creepy duopoly until eventually I'm able to stop using smartphones at all and go back to a dedicated GPS or two, a dedicated music player, and LTE tethering a laptop if I need to look up anything. It'll be inconvenient, but I don't see another usable path out of the creepware spiral.
Nightlies are unstable by definition, btw. It's some autogenerated build nobody normally tests.
<https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/>
You could recoup some of the cost on the second hand market, from a cursory glance, for $400 you could find a buyer fast.
Maybe the default settings for Libre 5 are bad? Maybe the software can be improved to improve battery life?
These kinds of problems are often not background processes, but instead parts of the hardware which haven't been powered off or power gated correctly; even a small leak of a few mA could be enough to drain a battery much more quickly than the user would expect.
I really wanted to support the ecosystem outside of the existing duopoly but it just feels too unpolished and limited.
Tried figuring out how to setup a development environment but it didn't seem like it was possible on macOS or the instructions were too inaccessible for me to penetrate.
The hardware kill switches are a neat feature but I don't actually have a strong use case for them, and I'm not a big enough enthusiast.
Honestly, I'm wondering if it would be more effective to buy up some mainstream phone and sell modded versions of it with kill switches. If I had a strong desire for a phone with kill switches I'd probably hire someone to mod an existing phone, rather than build one from scratch.
> buy up some mainstream phone and sell modded versions of it with kill switches
Making the connections for the several different kill switches (cellular, wifi, microphone) on a phone whose form factor was not expressly designed for that, would probably result in a rather ugly-looking hack. Moreover, on the PinePhone at least, the cell modem is separate from the wifi chip, so you can kill one while leaving the other on, but I believe that on most phones they are part of the same SoC.
Kudos for using Linux, but that alone (and the hardware gimmicks) is really not enough to justify the cost.
P.S. For comparison the (somewhat) similarly spec'ed PinePhone costs 150-200 USD.
Much of that cost went into Linux driver/app/phosh development. It made libhandy happen, which become libadwaita. Future Linux-based mobile OSes will be able to stand on the shoulders of all that.
So it’s really more of a donation, plus I got a Linux phone on top of that.
Besides, if I’m lucky and the hardware and battery last long enough, I’ll be using the Librem 5 as a daily driver for a decade, which would help amortize the cost even more. During those years, I won’t have to worry much about software obsolescence. All the drivers have been mainlined into Linux so I’ll always get to use the latest kernel version – even if something happened to Purism.
Still, that did last me a decade; although I replaced it with a PinePhone rather than a Librem ;)
--- First of all, we would like to thank you for your patience and for your support. We do acknowledge that things take longer than we all want and we apologize for any inconvenience.
Sadly, we do not process any refunds at the moment (not just pre-orders), but we do offer two other options which may be ok with you. One is to get the phone which you have pre-ordered (we could ship it within several business days). Another is to receive a store credit +20% gratitude on top of the amount paid.
As I do not have any timeline for the refund all the information I currently have indicates it will not be processed any time soon. I'm very sorry and wish I had a better answer for you. ---
lite phone: https://www.thelightphone.com/shop/products/light-phone-ii-b...
The reviews of this phone that I've seen have been pretty brutal so I've avoided it.
mudita: https://store.mudita.com/store/mudita-pure-minimalist-phone-...
Out of stock, but looked interesting.
Anyone aware of any others?
I met someone in Bellingham with one of these things once. It was pretty sweet, and they'd explicitly cited their having culled their smartphone addiction with it as a selling point, so I guess it works to some degrees. I forget off the top of my head exactly which feature I wish it had that I wanted to sideload on, but whatever.
Battery life is not great but manageable. I bought two spare batteries as backups. I charge the phone at home, and put it into suspend when I’m on the go. Battery life may even improve as software and drivers mature.
Build quality is very decent. Hardware performance is barely enough for web browsing. But you get used to it quickly.
Sad to hear it's not performant at all. Have you looked at Pinephone?
Could I hook this up to a monitor and actually enjoy using it for web/email/slack?
I don't expect a good experience for using VSCode to develop locally on the device, but perhaps using VSCode via github codespaces or gitpod
my keyboard, mouse, and speakers are connected to my monitor. i connect the phone via a single USB-C cable. suddenly i have full-blown gnome, exactly as i would on a desktop PC or laptop. applications and the launcher return to their normal, desktop layout when using the desktop mode.
it's "just plain old linux with gnome" as long as it's connected to your peripherals, only going into a custom UI when you go mobile. much like the steam deck, but without the clunky "switch to desktop/gaming mode" transition.
the oomph is obviously a little underwhelming but it's enough for lightweight development or (non-video) web browsing.
i haven't had success with calls or text messages (verizon and t-mobile), though. i want to like the librem but i haven't been able to actually use it as a phone.
I agree about Web video: I've dug up some old youtube-dl scripts, updated them to yt-dlp, and now watch videos comfortably in VLC. I used to fetch videos automatically from YouTube's RSS feeds, rather than visiting the Web site "manually"; I haven't resurrected that yet (assuming those feeds are still published?).
One day?
Does youtube work? Does zoom work?