💾 Archived View for lantashifiles.com › gemlog › entries › 2023-04-10.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:17:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've been doing a lot of computing using my Pinephone for the past year, or more. I've lost track! The Pinephone works pretty well with a dock, hooked to a monitor.
I've had to learn to scale down the apps I use for doing, well, what I do! The Pinephone isn't great at running Manuskript, and completely blew up running LibreOffice. So I have been doing my writing with Emacs. Firefox? The Pinephone would launch it, but FF was seriously slow on the Pinephone. So for the web, I used lynx. Etc.
Lagrange ran decently on it (great job Skyjake!), but I usually used amfora, because I was using Terminal for so much anyways. I really enjoy the digital minimalist lifestyle, and, well, a pretty minimalist lifestyle all around.
Using a Pinephone is a little bit limiting, but, in a way, that was by design. So, getting a new device to play around with is a little intimidating, because, well, does that mean I'm going to be doing different things?
Okay, so, Librem 5's are starting to get around! I think Purism is starting to catch up on these a bit, though if you buy directly from them, it looks like you still have a 52 week wait. Or so it says on their website.
The Librem 5's also appear on Ebay, or people sell them on Purism's forums.
Well, one way or another, I now have a Librem 5. And thank you to... well, you know who you are!
It is really exciting that these new mobile devices - Pinephones and Librem 5's, are getting out to people! And not just those devices. Pine64 now has a tablet that runs on a RISC-V chip! That's great. I don't think I'm picking up more toys though. I have an awesome new toy to play with, or rather, computer to use!
Yes, it is a computer! I am using it as a computer. And phone too. The Pinephone does okay as a computer too, as long as I mainly stay in the Terminal. With the Librem 5 I'm using graphical programs again.
The apps I used on a desktop works on this thing, and pretty well! I tested Youtube on Firefox, and Youtube works pretty well. I've installed web apps using Gnome Web. More importantly, Manuskript is working really well! I have managed to write quite a bit with Emacs (sorry vi guys!) but while Emacs is awesome, Manuskript is a lot easier to organize with (Emacs guys.. I'm still using Emacs to do my Python and C++, so I haven't abandoned it!).
LibreOffice Writer works pretty well. Reading PDFs on the Librem 5 is pretty slick. A couple of games - FreeCiv, Solitaire, Frozen Bubble, etc. And I have C++ programs compiling just fine! I need to play with 3D games and see how they do.
And while I have tested the phone and text messages, and they all work just fine, this really isn't a phone. It is a computer, that also happens to have a phone built in.
I'm thinking of it as a scaled-up Pinephone. I guess you could also think of it as a "scaled down" System76 or ThinkPenguin or whatever computer.
I will probably write about my impressions some more, once I get it more broken in. Since I am coming from a Pinephone, I think of the Librem 5 as just "jazzing up" my computing life a little bit. Things run faster. More apps work. It is starting to feel like a Debian experience (or Debian derivative.. pick your distribution!)
So, with this new device, the Librem 5, am I still practicing Digital Minimalism? :) Well, I don't use Facebook, or Twitter, and my main social experience is Gemini. So I'm not doing that bad! And I'm still planning to keep my browsing experience minimal. I do my best to avoid news, most video, and stick to apps where I can write or program.
In other words, while is seems to be a much more capable device, I plan to do the same things with it - read ebooks, write, program... and travel around Geminispace in my spare time ;-) I just might be using slighty better apps to do it with.
I still plan to be offline a lot, to spend time with my family, and with friends. And I still plan to spend most of my time on the smolnet. And, hopefully, finish some of the stories I'm always talking about!