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All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

puri.sm

121–130 of 132 posts

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#121
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two generations of pinephone disagree. I think the price is due to labor costs for software.

> I think the price is due to labor costs for software.

Mostly, but not only. There's also user support, and PinePhones are much cheaper to build.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#122
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 No…

The battery of my Librem 5 (L5v1-05) only lasts a night when doing nothing. I charge it in the evening and in the morning it's nearly empty. 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.

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.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#123

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…

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 No…

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.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#124
post #85
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do volumes compare to say the Unihertz[1] phones, which are also niche phones, yet all list for under $400? 1: https://www.unihertz.com/collections/smartphones

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.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#125

When will refunds be fulfilled? I've been waiting months on one.

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. ---

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#126
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, d…

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.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, d…

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…

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.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#128
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does putting into suspend look like? 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 unt…

Suspend button is now available in the power menu (top right on the drop down overlay), after being enabled from Mobile Settings

Thanks, I completely overlooked that button.

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#129

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 co…

> 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 hardwar…

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 ;)

Re: All Librem 5 smartphones have shipped

#130

Has anyone actually tried using the "convergent os" features for work? 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

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 peri…

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?).

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