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Purism

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

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

• PureOS Crimson Development Report: March 2025 - April 15, 2025
• World Quantum Day: Embracing Post-Quantum Encryption for a Secure Future - April 14, 2025
• Made in America: Purism’s Liberty Phone and the Vision of Security, Privacy, and Independence - April 9, 2025

Appreciating the little things

Welcome back!  Since our first update in July 2024, our PureOS Crimson updates have addressed major foundational work.  We’ve handled archive maintenance, infrastructure work, and critical functionality.  These lay the foundation for a solid operating system.

Now that the foundations are strong, we’re working up the stack into the individual packages that form PureOS.

PureOS developer Sebastian Krzyszkowiak has been hard at work with a staggering number of package updates in March!

Synchronize

PureOS includes most of the thousands of packages from Debian with no changes, but we have also patched many packages.  Frequently, we improve applications to adapt to small screens.  Sometimes, we enable support for Purism hardware that isn’t upstream yet.  Of course, we patch some packages to change the OS branding as well.

Once we patch a package, Laniakea can no longer synchronize it automatically from Debian.  Doing so would drop our patches.  Instead, it displays a synchronization issue, and our team must integrate our changes into the new package manually.

Each time a synchronization issue occurs, we must incorporate our changes into a new version of the package.  Often, we can simply re-apply the patch if the source has not changed much.  Whenever possible, we send our changes upstream.  Once it is present in the upstream package, we can drop it from PureOS.  Our goal is to send as much work upstream as we can, which benefits the wider community and also reduces our maintenance costs.

Sebastian resynchronized eight packages from Debian Bookworm in March.  Six have patches in PureOS: geoclue, cloud-initramfs-tools, util-linux, rootskel-gtk, libnitrokey, and gpodder.  One package, lsb-release, had an errant version in the PureOS archive and was resynchronized with upstream.  Finally, while pureos-store is unique to PureOS, it is based on gnome-software, and we resynchronized it with the version in Bookworm.

Improve

We also improved ten more packages in Crimson, fixing a number of issues.

We discuss librem5-base frequently – it’s a key package on the Librem 5, and in many ways it brings the many parts of the OS together to form a complete system.  The latest improvements to librem5-base provide more reliability improvements, address related package changes from upstream, and fix partition sizing in the first boot.

Improvements to librem5-flash-image make it easier to use and reduce maintenance.  Two packages received fixes that were backported from later versions: gtk and gnss-share.  Additional packages all received new fixes and improvements: osk-sdl, millipixels, wlroots-0.16, python-apt, and phoc.

A few updates reached both Crimson and Byzantium, benefiting Librem 5 owners right away.  Image Viewer was adjusted to open your Pictures directory right away, so you don’t have to open an image manually.  Robustness improvements make your phone more reliable and more responsive.

Finally, a number of fixes are ready for the next Librem 5 kernel release, which will reach both Byzantium and Crimson.  The touchscreen will no longer occasionally get stuck with active touches, so buttons will always react to a touch.  Fast USB chargers providing more than 3 amps will use the full 3 amps supported by the Librem 5.  Reading and writing the internal storage is faster, as well.

Looking forward

We also opened several new issues in this period, which we expected as we are able to test more functionality with a firm foundation.  Most of these are not necessary for the first alpha milestone, but we do plan to fix them for the general release.

We’re completing work faster than new work appears, and it’s clear that we are on the downhill slope toward the alphas and general release.  To see what is left, check out our PureOS milestones, and stay tuned to our news page for our next update!