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Purism

Beautiful, Secure, Privacy-Respecting Laptops, Tablets, PCs, and Phones

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

• PureOS Crimson: August 2025 – Alpha Released - September 15, 2025
• Blanket App Now Available - September 15, 2025
• META Found Guilty of Mishandling Women’s Health Information - September 15, 2025

Alpha images are released!

We have released alpha images for PureOS Crimson for all Librem devices and have closed the first milestone!

Thank you to all of our supporters and PureOS subscribers who have made this possible.

Give this alpha a try!

• Librem 13, 14, 15, and Mini: Follow our PureOS installation instructions, which include a link to the Crimson images as a preview
• Librem 5: Follow our Librem 5 reflashing instructions, which mentions how to use the latest Crimson preview
• Librem 11: Follow our Librem 11 reflashing instructions, which use the latest Crimson image
• Librem Server: Follow our server reflashing instructions, which use the latest Crimson image

As you try it out, review the known issues and let us know about your experience.

Quality through testing

Purism’s goal is to build high quality, secure, privacy-respecting devices.  Quality comes from design, engineering, and testing.  Assurance of quality through testing is value we add when we distribute upstream software.  It’s also a key reason for customers to choose our products.

Even though we’re at an alpha milestone, we still needed to test these images for quality.  The goal of alpha is to provide an OS where essential functionality works, so community members can test the images and provide meaningful feedback.  If everyone hits a roadblock during installation, we can’t get feedback.

Testing failure is success

It’s easy as an engineer to get discouraged when your work doesn’t pass testing.  But a failing test isn’t a failure, it’s a success – we found this issue before it affected any customers.

For the PureOS Alpha images, we identified several issues, which are all linked from our test results:

Most of the images were affected by issues in the onboarding flow, it didn’t fit on small screens.  Sebastian already fixed that in gnome-initial-setup, so that will be fixed in our first images for beta.

We also found out that Librem 5r2 images (Birch and Chestnut) did not boot at all.  This happened due to an unexpected interaction between the image recipe for Crimson and the boot process.  The bootloader was trying to detect the device revision automatically, even though we still ship separate images for r2/r3/r4.  That’s exactly the sort of thing that shows the importance of QA testing – nobody making the individual changes would have foreseen this, but testing the combined result caught it.  Sebastian again had a solution for this, so the images for all Librem 5 revisions work again.

Although we ship GNOME on all of our devices, we also offer a KDE Plasma install ISO for those who prefer it.  The KDE Plasma installer currently has two issues during installation, but there’s a straightforward workaround for each that we documented on those tickets.  We decided that we can fix those issues in beta, we can still get good feedback in alpha by installing with those workarounds.

Release day

At last, with test results in hand, we released the PureOS Crimson Alpha images!  That doesn’t mean we stopped for a break though, as there’s plenty more to do.  Sebastian has already fixed two issues affecting Firefox, updated the Librem 5 kernel to Linux 6.6.101, and fixed the first-run setup’s fit for small displays.  If you install the alpha images, update your system to see the latest changes.

The road ahead

Our focus now is on the next milestone, the beta release.  This milestone will allow you to update directly from PureOS Byzantium without a reflash.  Major functionality will work, and we’ll ensure that systems on the beta will be able to update directly to the general release.

We’ve already closed 8 tasks for beta.  All feedback from the alpha is helpful, so we can prioritize issues for the right milestone, and consider subscribing to help us bring this to release faster.