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.
These days when suspended it lasts about 20-22h with modem on when laying there and doing nothing. With the modem off it's probably >30h (extrapolating from power consumption, haven't actually tested in a while). In my regular usage it usually lasts 6-10h depending on how much I use it during the day, which is still rather short, but long enough that it's pretty rare that it goes flat before I can charge it. I don't even bother with power banks most of the time.
> 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.
> if you don't mind not using tethering with turned off screen.
Isn’t there a feature to disable the hibernation timer if tethering is on? That seems like something that could be hacked in just a few lines of code. For my own use, I already found on someone’s Github a systemd service that disables hibernation when the PinePhone is playing audio. (Of course, I agree with you on the last point.)
A lot of the hacking I did on the Nokia N900, I did while standing in queues at shops or riding on buses. The built-in keyboard made that easy. Sure, I could use a Bluetooth keyboard with the current Linux phones, but it is not as convenient.
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.
My point was more "I wasn't even waiting for some perfect v1 release to finally try things on, I was willing to try new features as they came to trunk, and yet still, basic functionalities never became even approximately useful, even for someone who's run llvm-musl Gentoo with out-of-tree kernel patches on ARM laptops before and clearly isn't afraid of Weird Gear and Weird Software Stacks"
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.
Two ways to trigger it: timed (via Settings) and ad-hoc (via a software button in a separate Mobile Settings app).
When suspend is triggered, the screen turns off. (You can tell it’s suspend because the phone cools down considerably after a while.) Calls and SMS will wake it up but other events won’t. Waking up with the side button is instant, but it takes a few seconds until wifi and mobile data come up again.
Mobile data comes back up pretty much instantly, it's just WiFi that takes some time. For the record, WiFi connects back very fast after switching NetworkManager to (experimental) iwd backend instead of wpa_supplicant, but it breaks WiFi-based location because Geoclue only knows how to talk to wpa_supplicant.
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.
YouTube works on Firefox but you need patience.
As in: it takes 20 seconds for the front page to fully load and render. Then add another 10 secs to start a video and put it into full screen.
Took me a couple of days to get used to that. But now it’s the new normal for me. And that’s after having a snappy iPhone for years.
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.
Sad reflection of the realities of manufacturing, I suspect. They won’t ever achieve the kind of scale you’d need to make it cheaper.
IMO it is what it is. Especially when you consider the hardware kill switches etc this is a niche product that the right small audience will pay $1.2k for.
Not cell phones. I remember when the most expensive phone you could get was like $700. Then all the stories about how prices were about to hit a ludicrous four figures. Now there's a wide variety of phones that cost four figures.
Man, I miss the days when you could get a rootable phone that could run the latest LineageOS for like $80. (That's how much it was for my Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE which was extremely rootable.)
I miss the days when there was hardware differentiation at any price. There is literally one brand of phone right now that both A) has a headphone jack and B) doesn't have some kind of screen cutout for the selfie camera, and that's the Sony Xperia line. Despite the price (their entire line of current models is >$1000), I would probably pay it (or buy an older year model on ebay) except that they are not compatible with my provider (or at least uncertainly so, the internet has mixed things to say and they are 100% for sure not _officially_ supported.
I ended up going with a 3 year old phone from a different manufacturer that is officially supported but still had to give up the headphone jack.
B is super important to me, so my phone right now is a OnePlus 7 Pro. It was one of the last models ever made that can still pass SafetyNet while rooted (due to being whitelisted for "basic" / non-hardware-backed attestation). Unfortunately now it's several versions out of date and will stay that way for the foreseeable future, on top of the fact that nobody's figured out how to lock the bootloader on a custom ROM, despite the fact that it'll get you back Widevine L1 keys (the 7 Pro doesn't erase them on bootloader unlock like most phones do).
But this all stopped mattering to me when something accidentally activated a "feature"[0] of TWRP that erased my device and the maintainers have so far been completely hostile to the notion of adding an option to disable that functionality. ADHD now permanently bars me from any form of tweaking because the risk of TWRP suddenly erasing my device one day cannot be mitigated whatsoever. Even making backups from TWRP is off-limits because I'm afraid of it erasing my device instead.
Now I just use my phone because OxygenOS is great, the hardware mute switch is great, lack of camera cutout is great (fuck rounded corners though), and it has some serious flagship specs. Not an advertisement or anything, but this was $300 refurbished from Back Market.
Yikes, that issue you opened is like the exact opposite of proper etiquette for asking maintainers of open source software to help you. Basically what you’re doing is making a feature request, there is no bug or issue with TWRP as multiple people told you on GitHub. It’s absolutely not cool to continue to hound open source contributors for timelines like that. You’re not their boss, if it’s such an important issue to you fix it yourself and create a pull/merge request.
This is not just a nice-to-have thing, this is their project proactively running something that I did not authorize without informing me or giving me any chance to prevent it. I absolutely consider it a huge problem, not just a bug, that this functionality cannot be disabled in any way. Therefore I did not file a simple feature request for the setting because the deeper problem is that this functionality exists in the first place in a non-disableable manner.
I don't feel safe, no amount of discussion about etiquette will make me stop seeing this as a critical vulnerability that needs to be fixed, and it could take days or weeks of work for me to figure out how to compile TWRP properly if I were to fold at this point to the ten people telling me to just do it myself, which is a really stupid (imho) time investment that isn't compatible with my disabilities, sorry.
Something you did caused it to happen. Again, what you’re asking for has nothing to do with their project and is not a vulnerability in the slightest. It’s a feature working as intended, you should be focusing on what you did to cause it to happen. You’re also free to not use TWRP it if it doesn’t work for you.
I saw the issue you created and the comments, and they're pretty demanding IMO. It may be a grave problem and hypothetically the devs missed it and you're correct, instead of constantly adding new comments you can try forking and adding that option yourself.
The devs will be grateful, your problem will be resolved and you'll probably feel better about the whole situation.
The problem is that I'm absolutely not an Android developer and the process of building images for these devices is super convoluted. I have no idea how the official builds work nor can I find any consistent documentation on exactly what I need to do in order to configure everything properly to build for my device. It seriously is a mountain of work compared to someone who already has a development environment and my ADHD says no.
I almost said something along those lines too, how the skyrocketing prices have come alongside increasingly homogeneous boring phones with fewer features, but absolutely. I was recently going through my old HTC EVO 3D, and I would give my left nut to get that 3-D technology back in a new phone, the pictures and videos put you back in the moment in ways 2-D can't. Incidentally, I also just upgraded last week from my old Sony Xperia 5 II to a Sony Xperia 5 III. Which hopefully lasts a long time, because Sony is also removing features; the 5 III added a second zoom lens, but the 5 IV regressed to a single smaller one, and the just-announced 5 V removes the telephoto lens completely.
Not when you had to split already relatively small production batches into even smaller ones because the entire supply chain has collapsed and you couldn't obtain components in any helpful quantity for about two years.
With labor costs skyrocketing across the globe (for good reason) I sometimes wonder how long it will be until we get "flat-pack" electronics, i.e. where things come largely disassembled and you must put it together before using. Framework is kinda heading in this direction with laptops.
Flat-pack furniture is not an efficiency due to the cost of assembly, but shipping, as furniture is mostly air. You will note that most flat-pack furniture designs somehow fit incredibly efficiently into cubic prisms that themselves fit suspiciously conveniently into standard shipping containers.
By contrast, consider a modern smartphone. There is very little volume to be won by shipping it as parts, and there is greatly increased risk of customer dissatisfaction due to customers-at-large being clumsy, untrained, unequipped and unaccustomed to the assembly task. Just look at how popular it is to complain about assembling Ikea furniture, compare/contrast with e.g. PC assembly, and then scale that up...
The final assembly, while it doesn't cost nothing, isn't that expensive.
What does cost more is final testing, to make sure all the components work together. It is cheaper to do that well at the end of the assembly process before starting packaging, than to deal with a high rate of returns. The testing done throughout the manufacturing process is a significant cost.
I think pine64's business model is to pursue sales volume, but it's unclear to me if there's enough buyers of linux phones for that approach to be sustainable long-term. Maybe if they can keep refreshing their model with regular hardware upgrades, they can milk their base.
Having a pine64 style competitor is problematic for Purism since it's cannibalizing their sales. It's likely contributing to the even higher prices needed just to keep the lights on. Which just creates more pressure diverting potential sales towards pine64.
Would Purism even move more product if their prices better matched pine64's? Is there a queue of would-be librem5 buyers waiting that just can't stomach the price? How many people are there really who want a chunky phone with work-in-progress software, regardless of price?
My prediction is after Purism implodes Pine64's prices start climbing.
I am just going with a Fairphone 5 and if the need arises pull out the module. Cheaper, more performance, repairable and if you really wanted you could probably even fit microswitches.
Without looking into this further, a lot of smaller manufacturers license standard designs from chinese companies as a base. I don't know if that's the case here, but it's one explanation. This is obviously not a good option for an open source phone.
It's probably coming for us all. The increasingly saturated smartphone market will not provide the sales that manufacturers need to maintain the current economies of scale. That is, unless they perfect the art of phones engineered for a very particular lifetime.
Well, people in the PRC aren’t really working for peanuts nowadays either. They’re not making US/EU wages, but they ain’t working for free, either. China has been doing its own outsourcing of cheap labor to places like Vietnam.
Labor is nowhere near the only factor that makes Chinese sources cheaper. It’s the ecosystem. There’s an entire industry that can do every possible thing, and they’re doing it all the time, so they’re flexible and configurable and can quickly spin out a variant on your standard-issue smartphone like it’s nothing.
(Well, assuming Xi’s recent megalomania hasn’t slowly started to destroy all that…)
>Well, people in the PRC aren’t really working for peanuts nowadays either. They’re not making US/EU wages, but they ain’t working for free, either.
Mate, forget about chinese wages being livable as an argument.
First and foremost, US/EU workers aren't working in factories which have suicide nets on them, that alone shroud tell you everything.
Secondly, workers in the US have it so good that they don't even want to work in semiconductor factories of TSMC (the better paid kind of skilled factories with weight on your resume), let alone consumer electronic factories where you're a disposable cog, least ones which need suicide nets to keep you from killing yourself after your 12h shift and living in a shipping container village.
Just because Chinese labor is now statistically getting more expensive doesn't mean those Chinese workers making your iPhone or 'Black Friday impulse buy e-waste', have it that much better in terms of QoL that would get them even within spitting distance of western QoL.
I believe the USA manufactured version is the “Liberty Phone” starting $2199. The regular Librem appears to be made in China. https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/
A modern smartphone is a tremendous device. In convergent mode many people would not need a laptop or desktop. With replaceable parts and upgradeable open source software it could last a decade. Further, what exactly is a sane digital society without embedded surveillance worth in dollars?
There is no reason why such phones shouldnt have a mass market and more approachable prices. The status quo is a market failure, not a law of nature.
No.. This is the price of buying a phone from a company that doesn't know anything about hardware design, and nothing about software needed. They're a scam.
I have not paid that for my lifetime total of smart phones.
Sure, my phone is out of date and some lesser stats. But for half the performance (which used to be called great performance at one time) I pay 5% the price.
the librem isn't really about great performance though, it's about specialization/niche use cases. it also doesn't benefit from economies of scale nearly as much
My Purism phone worked for about 48 hours. Then it bricked. Disgusted with myself for buying it on an impulse, though in my defense I was - at the time - happy with my Purism laptop. Purism is forever on my do-not-buy list after my phone experience.
I love DEX but it's not truly ready for be used as an everyday OS. I wish Samsung would devote more resources into it though. I've always loved the idea of unified computing and the phones in our pockets are really some powerful machines.
Yes, so the point is that people who care a lot about such things may not consider vanilla Android or iOS to be ‘true’ operating systems, but rather a sandbox with limited functionality.
I've tried Dex as a daily driver. It's unusable. It's slow, doesn't have customization options nor sane defaults. Alt-Tab is extremely non reliable. I ditched it.
I bought a Pixel 6a earlier this year, and traded in my Pixel 3a for $150 USD off the $300 sale price. Other than the fingerprint reader being kind of terrible, it was worth it to get a new battery and OS updates for the next few years for $150 (plus tax and shipping).
If you don't want to spend a lot on a phone, you can do that.
It's true, and my partner got a free phone by switching to Fi. My switch was just ill-timed... I tried out an iPhone on a new carrier for the first time, and hated both so much I paid to get out of the contract and start a new service with another carrier and Android again.
I believe the context here is that they have been very delayed in shipping orders and customers that requested refunds were being put off. I think this is trying to signal that those troubles with production are behind them.
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.