Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.)

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.

> I wonder if the lack of a physical keyboard discourages hacking.

You can still use whatever bluetooth keyboard you have on hand. I don't think that's a serious issue.

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 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.

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.

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

>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.

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

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.