Librem 5: first impressions

Mon 21 March 2022

In February 2018 I placed an order for a Librem 5.
Today it finally arrived.

The Librem 5 does not run Android or iOS, it runs a proper Linux operating system (PureOS, derived
from Debian). There are hardware kill switches for the baseband modem, the camera and microphone, and WiFi and bluetooth.
The phone’s main selling point is that it doesn’t spy on you.

If you don’t care that your phone is spying on you, then the Librem 5 is not for you. If your response to
complaints like “the camera app is hard to use and can’t take video” is “why don’t you just buy an iPhone?”
then you have totally missed the point. The Librem 5 is not in the same category of things as the iPhone. Anybody
who would enjoy a Librem 5 would not be able to tolerate an iPhone (and vice versa).

The short version

(For context, my previous phone was a OnePlus One running Ubuntu Touch.)

The Librem 5 is a lot better than I had been led to believe. It’s much faster and more responsive than the OnePlus One, and
although I had heard a rumour that phone calls don’t work, they work perfectly.
Great success, good job Purism. If you are the kind of person who dismisses Android and iOS
out of hand because you like freedom, then the Librem 5 is a good phone for you and you should buy it (but, again:
if you don’t care that your phone is spying on you, then the Librem 5 is not for you).

Notable parts that work:

• WiFi works, no setup required beyond selecting a network and entering the password.
• Calling works, no setup required beyond installing a SIM card and rebooting.
• SMS works, no setup required beyond installing a SIM card and rebooting.
• 4G works after you manually setup the APN settings; the phone defaults to Tesco Mobile settings, for some reason.
• Hosting WiFi hotspots works, no setup required beyond enabling the option.
• Email works, just the normal IMAP and SMTP setup.

Notable parts that don’t work as well as they should:

• The camera app works, but you have to manually set gain, exposure, white balance, and focus. It also seems to take about 10 seconds to save a JPEG to the disk, so you won’t be taking photos very rapidly, and it has no way to record a video, and the quality is bad if there isn’t enough light. I find the camera too annoying to use, it is the phone’s largest drawback.
• The default browser has a few input bugs: if the text in a search box is longer than the box, and you want to edit some text that has scrolled out of view, you just can’t. There is no way to horizontally scroll the text box in the browser. This is not a general UI bug, it works fine in other apps. There is also no way to open a link in a new tab: long press on a link pops up a context menu, but you can’t select anything in the context menu because it disappears as soon as you take your finger off the screen. Firefox is also available (sudo apt install firefox-esr) and doesn’t have either of these problems.
• The maps app has a way for you to search for start and end destinations. The search is really bad, it doesn’t recognise postcodes and it thinks all towns are in America. Once you have managed to correctly select a start point and an end point, and you want to start navigation, you can’t, because the UI disappears off the right hand edge of the screen so you can’t reach the “start navigation” button that presumably exists. If you rotate the screen into landscape mode then it now disappears off the bottom edge of the screen and you still can’t reach any buttons.
• The battery life seems short. I’m pretty sure that I charged it up to 99% when I plugged it in this afternoon. It’s
  now 10pm and I just went to check something in Firefox and found that the battery has died already. And I haven’t exactly been using it
  heavily. It’s possible that I misunderstood how much I had charged it, but so far this is a bad sign.

The rest of this post is roughly a stream of consciousness of my thoughts as I first interacted with the phone.

Unboxing

It’s big. It’s heavy. The outer casing is aluminium, I expected plastic.

It takes USB-C, which is annoying, as I like to live in the past. The charging cable has USB-C on both ends which
means it’s not possible to charge from my normal USB charging dock, so I have to use the bundled UK-to-USA-to-USB
power adapter. The UK-USA plug adapter feels sturdier than some that I’ve used, but not as sturdy as a real 3-pin plug.
The USB-C cable is very chunky, I’m not sure if this is a good sign as it carries lots of