• 3 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2022

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  • I daily drive the Librem 5 and am typing this reply from the phone. The honest feedback (and tl;dr) is that it is a good device for those who value privacy over convenience.

    The hardware kill switches are a nice touch, especially on the camera/microphone. I don’t have moments of suspicion that if I have a conversation about a toaster that I will suddenly start seeing ads about toasters everywhere.

    It’s nice not to be bombarded with notifications to review their app, accept TOS that my data will be used to sell me stuff, irremovable bloatware, and some of the other annoyances we got used to experiencing.

    As a basic communications device it works fine. Phone calls (VoLTE) and SMS text messaging works, depending if your carrier allows you to BYOD and provides the network info. SMS can sometimes get “clogged” in the modem when there is a very active group text; but for me usually resetting the modem using the hardware killswitch, a 15 second process, fixes it.

    Of course the downside is a more limited app ecosystem compared to Android. You will have to search for convergent apps and flatpaks, but I have found everything I need through Flathub.

    The camera does not take influencer quality photos, but if you need to take a quick picture of something and share it, then it works.

    Battery life is definitely something to be desired, but I can make it through a work day with automatic suspend doing some light web browsing and sending some messages throughout the day.

    Since I mostly use a computer for web browsing, emails, and word processing, I dock my phone and use it in desktop mode. It’s not blazing fast, but for my purposes it is more than fine. Its actually a cool feeling to sit at my desk, start typing an email, listening to music, and then undocking my phone and continue the email on the go from the same device.














  • When I did some research on hardware keys I was between Yubikey and Nitrokey. I ended up going with Yubikey because KeepassXC supported it.

    Something to keep in mind is purchasing a backup key. I bought one for my wife and we use each other’s as a backup.

    For KeepassXC it does not support registering multiple keys (at least not that I have figured out), so I have a copy of my database where it uses my wife’s key as a backup.


  • That’s really what I use the terminal for too. GUI stores still tend to feel very slow to install things. If I know the package name it’s much faster to just type the command in a terminal.

    Same for making simple modifications to config files. ‘Sudo nano filename’, make the tweak, save and exit.



  • True, no one was arguing against repurposing, and I wasn’t accusing you of such.

    Your comment said the answer was not to purchase an old iPad and use the money to get a cheap modern android tablet. My response was just to point out that not everyone may be aware of the planned obsolescence, and the particularly aggressive stance Apple takes.

    Although if the OP found Lemmy I guess there should be some assumption of being knowledgeable about the tech world 😅