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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%

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.

dsco 3y ago
Could this be a software issue? Did you check if there are background processes draining your battery?
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  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?
- cesarb 3y ago
  > 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.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
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.
- not_your_vase 3y ago
  > 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.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    > 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.)
  - megous 3y ago
    Wifi chip can wake the phone up just fine via a WoL packet, or by pattern matching for any packet content. Also nobody forbids apps from just waking the phone periodically to perform any actions, incl. making a notification.
- jolmg 3y ago
klardotsh 3y ago
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.
- megous 3y ago
  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.
  - klardotsh 3y ago
    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"
oever 3y ago
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. <https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/>
npteljes 3y ago
>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.

dsco 3y ago

Could this be a software issue? Did you check if there are background processes draining your battery?

SamuelAdams 3y ago
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?
cesarb 3y ago
> 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.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

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.

not_your_vase 3y ago
> 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.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > 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.)
- megous 3y ago
  Wifi chip can wake the phone up just fine via a WoL packet, or by pattern matching for any packet content. Also nobody forbids apps from just waking the phone periodically to perform any actions, incl. making a notification.
jolmg 3y ago

klardotsh 3y ago

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.

megous 3y ago
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.
- klardotsh 3y ago
  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"

oever 3y ago

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. <https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-battery-life-improved-by-100/>

npteljes 3y ago

>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.