First Week Librem 5

I recently received the Librem 5 phone that I bought few years ago from the crowd founding campaign.

To whom don't know the Librem 5 comes with a proper Linux (not android) pre-installed and a desktop environment based on gnome, after the smooth first boot, I could open the terminal and open vi that's already a lot for a phone, also I could do the updates using apt that is also a big thing from my point of view.

From the first hour of use I also discovered a new software cowbird that is a GTK twitter client, also I could set up tootle for mastodon smoothly, and for the emails I tried Geary that is pretty fine for a mobile environment, all of this taken from the official software repo that came built in.

One issue I had at first is that when I walked in a coffee and connected to the public WiFi the browser did not detect the captive portal, then when I went home I installed firefox-esr (strangely there is no firefox latest in the latest repo) for have a try the following days.

One of the following day I went to a coffee again, and I tried again first with default browser, and this time I managed to access the coffee login accepting the "wrong certificate", and then the WiFi was working properly, so far good. Few days after that I tried again the first coffee place where I had a problem, and using firefox detection of captive portal I managed to login to the WiFi there as well, I can say I could manage all the public WiFi access I could stumble up on so far.

Another cool thing of having a Linux phone is that you can install a ssh server and do some remote controlling, I did and I managed to connect to it via ssh and manage it like any other Linux machine, one thing I suggest to anyone that want to try that, is to keep the ssh disabled and off most of the time and turn it on only when on safe network.

Being also a rust developer I tried was play with rust on it, was a pleasure to find rust in the repository even though it was a bit old (1.48), installed that and installed git, trough ssh I could clone one of my rust projects and try to compile it, the cargo check worked just fine, the full compilation it actually failed, the project I tried it takes a few minutes to compile on my laptop (Intel i7), on the Librem 5 it didn't manage to finish, the compiler crashed after a long while, after that I tried a cargo install tokei and it worked just fine, my feeling is just that my project is too heavy on the compiler for that hardware.

Anyway having there Vim and the cargo check working I could say that I could already use this phone for some basic development, with a full cycle for small things and rely on external environments (like a CI) for heavier projects.

Forgetting my coding attempts that do not actually make much sense on a so small screen and without a proper keyboard (maybe on a future converge ;)), all I did on this phone was actually checking twitter and mastodon and reading relative links, I tried as well to Giara reddit client but I failed to complete the logins, I may try again in future.

I haven't tried yet to use it as a proper phone because I do not have a SIM card for it yet, as well I haven't setup any messaging system, I may try this later on.

One thing that I noticed that was a pleasure that I want also on my desktop, was the notifications of when a command finished on the terminal, really why don't we have this on GNOME Terminal desktop ??

That's all for the first week, will see how it goes on later on I may write some more posts in future about this.