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Purism

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

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

• PureOS Crimson Development Report: April 2026 – PureOS Crimson Released - May 20, 2026
• Geofence Warrants, Location Data, and the Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age - May 18, 2026
• Purism’s Product Philosophy in an Age of Government–Big Tech Convergence - May 11, 2026

The finish line!

The moment we have anticipated is finally here – PureOS Crimson is released!

All devices running PureOS Byzantium will receive the PureOS Upgrade application with their regular software updates.  If you’d like to install Crimson fresh, refer to our installation instructions for PCs, servers, and the Librem 5.

This has been an exciting journey since we announced PureOS Subscriptions to advance this work and shared our first update.  Along the way, we tacked infrastructure, system integration, quality assurance, and much more.

This release is an accomplishment, and we’re proud to share it with you.  With Crimson in your hands, we are already looking forward to our next release – PureOS Dawn.

All aboard

Seeing the release date coming is a bit like seeing the last train of the day approaching the station, and everyone wanted to get on this train.  While we had chosen our release blockers judiciously, we brought in a number of additional improvements to make the best first impression for PureOS Crimson.

Reliability and stability

As with many prior updates, reliability and stability continue to play a major role in Crimson.  Thanks to all of our alpha and beta testers who provided feedback!  We found and fixed a corner case that could cause systems to suspend unexpectedly when suspend is enabled.  We fixed a crash that could occur when disconnecting an external display on the Librem 5 and Librem 11.

The Librem 5’s hardware killswitches can disable the internal accelerometer and other sensors, but in some cases this could cause the system to act like the sensor reported a value that didn’t make any sense.  That could cause an unexpected screen rotation.  That’s fixed now – we’ll now keep the last value correctly.

Metapackage maintenance

The PureOS metapackages describe what software is included in the standard installations.  For example, typical GNOME systems include many standard GNOME programs, like the calendar, text editor, Chatty, and others.  In addition to the applications, these also describe the components needed to make every part of the system work.  That includes components for sound, video, WiFi, and other functionality.

We made several updates to metapackages in anticipation of the release.  The PureOS Plasma image received some polish: we added standard KDE applications to it, avoided installing GNOME Software by default in Plasma, and provide minimal development tools on all desktop images.

Our GNOME and desktop metapackages received a few new dependencies to synchronize them with Debian Bookworm.  We also moved the Plymouth graphical bootsplash out of the basic “standard” metapackage, because server images don’t need graphical components.

Camera

The Librem 5 camera stack received a lot of improvements, just in time to board the release train.

The rear camera has long been affected by a silicon bug in the camera interface (ERR050384) that can lock up the camera interface in some circumstances.  By carefully adjusting the camera clock rates, we were able to avoid this problem in the camera modes used by Millipixels.

Millipixels itself received a number of updates too.  QR codes printed in red are easier to scan, and it’s easier to tap the overlay if the QR code detection is marginal.  Video recordings will have better audio synchronization and consistent white balance.  We fixed a few interface bugs, and an occasional crash.

Photos and videos now rotate automatically to match the phone’s orientation.  Finally, photo postprocessing now occurs on the GPU using OpenGL.  This is more efficient than processing on the CPU, and it allows us to produce better results with lens correction, tone mapping, and sharpening.

Our best PureOS yet

PureOS Crimson is designed to be our best PureOS yet.  All Purism devices can benefit from this update, including our earliest Librem 13 and 15 computers.  Purism hardware does not have an expiration date, and we’re proud to continue supporting these devices today.

PureOS Byzantium systems will receive PureOS Upgrade in their regular system updates, so upgrades are easy.

Onward to Dawn

Our work in PureOS is far from done, and we’re already working on the next major version, PureOS Dawn.  Much of the work done in Crimson extended to Dawn as well, and we expect the path to Dawn to be much shorter.  We’re excited to share more about Dawn in our next update, and until then, thanks to all of our PureOS subscribers for making this work possible!