Hacker News Reader

Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

> in fact, no device at all is reported as having a fully functioning camera, let alone everything else

My Librem 5's camera is fully functioning just fine. Many entries in that table are either outdated or pmOS-specific, or marked as "partial" because they require some tiny manual intervention that's not a big deal in practice.

View on HN

The pictures I shoot on my Librem 5 look nothing like the (pretty good) ones that you regularly post to the Fediverse. My photos are just a faded, grey, blurred, grainy mess. I can take the time and manually set focus (autofocus never works) but the manual focus slider and button are so difficult to read that by the time I figure out whether or not the slider is enabled, the photo opportunity is long gone.

When I look at your photos, I often wonder what I might be doing differently than you. But after two years of daily driving my Librem 5, I decided to no longer care, and just stopped making photos altogether.

I think that's because Sebastian develops software for the Librem 5 and thus is likely not running a stock PureOS Byzantium.

I managed to get similar results in my holidays in late August(on postmarketOS 25.06 with Millipixels 0.23.0 and a patched kernel [1]).

Please note that I just used the Librem 5 as my "mainline Linux camera" and have not had a SIM in it in a while, and thus can't comment on how well postmarketOS 25.06 would work for daily driving.

[1]: Based on the APKBUILD in postmarketOS (https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/blob...) with https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/merge_requests/816.pa... added on top.

The only major thing these kernel changes introduce is RAW10 support, which helps photos with high dynamic range that would have visible banding in the shadows otherwise. There are more changes, but their effects are either subtle or unrelated to still photos. Most of the pictures I post have been taken without these changes, only some of the most recent ones used them.

I am taking photos with regular Millipixels from PureOS Byzantium like everyone else, without setting anything manually aside of triggering the autofocus sequence when necessary (in the latest version it can be triggered by simply tapping the preview; previously you had to cycle the "auto" button). The only thing that I do differently is how I turn the raw DNG file into a JPEG: see https://gitlab.com/dos1/glowup and https://source.puri.sm/-/snippets/1223

Reply on news.ycombinator.com