PureOS Development Report: August 2026

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On our way to Alpha

We’re already working on building PureOS Dawn Alpha images, and we’re eager to get Dawn into your hands to test!  As always, stability and reliability are paramount, so this month brings even more improvements on both fronts.

Always more stable

We’re proud that PureOS Crimson is our most reliable release yet, but we’re not stopping there.  There’s always room for more improvement, and we’re pushing the boundary of reliability even further in Dawn.  Many of these changes even reached back to Crimson, so you can get them right away!

Clocking and signaling

You may have noticed that the Librem 5 display’s refresh rate was 63 frames per second instead of the usual 60.  The display’s clock rate was slightly too high.  This was because of other incorrect calculations – we had to overshoot the refresh rate slightly to compensate.  By now, all of those other issues have been fixed, and we’ve finally nailed down the refresh rate to exactly 60 Hz as well.

Waking the Librem 5 display with Phosh is also faster and more reliable.  Phosh uses a series of framebuffers to prepare the image shown on the display.  Phosh now keeps those framebuffers ready even when the display is off, so it can wake the display as quickly as possible.  We’ve also sent this improvement upstream, which will benefit other OSes using wlroots, both Phosh and in other environments.

Updating to the latest

Now that we have reached parity with Debian Trixie, we’re updating PureOS’s customizations with the latest foundations.  Support for Librem One accounts in GNOME is updated to use GTK4, and PureOS Store is now based on the latest GNOME Software in Debian Trixie.

We’re also continuing to backport the latest Mesa and etnaviv driver improvements to our development suite, octarine.  There is a lot of upstream work toward complete GLES3 support and performance improvements in the etnaviv driver, and this greatly benefits the Librem 5.

The Linux kernel for the Librem 5 is now updated from 6.12 to 6.18 as well.

Test images are on the way

Alpha images are in progress!  We’re working on switching from osk-sdl to unl0kr and updating first-boot reencryption to work with Debian Trixie.

We’re eager to get PureOS Dawn into your hands for early testing, and expect more on this in our next update!

 

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