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Purism

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

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

• PureOS Development Report: May 2026 - June 30, 2026
• Purism Announces Launch of Its Librem 16 Laptop, the World’s Most Private and Secure Workstation - June 23, 2026
• Google’s Lock Down Policy - May 21, 2026

A tale of two releases

Welcome back!  In our last update, we announced the release of PureOS Crimson!  We’re thrilled to share this release with you, and we hope you love it as much as we do.

We skipped ahead a little bit in that post, since the release occurred in May and we were eager to share it.  We made many more quality-of-life improvements in May leading up to the release.  Our work is speeding up too: we’re laying the foundation for PureOS Dawn, we just released the Librem 16 featuring PureOS Crimson, and we have many more projects picking up steam!

Still a few more seats on the train

With the PureOS Crimson train leaving the station, we included several more quality-of-life improvements in this release to make it the most robust PureOS yet.

PureOS Crimson now has packaged qdl and Waydroid.  Whether you are flashing the BM818 modem firmware with qdl or running Android apps in Waydroid, you can get those tools directly from the PureOS repository.

The PureOS installer works again on UEFI systems.  Purism’s Librem PCs all use PureBoot firmware, but maintaining UEFI support enables running PureOS on other hardware as well.

We updated the Librem EC kernel module, which controls some of Librem EC’s unique features, like battery charge thresholds that reduce wear on the battery.  We also support the latest NexDock lapdocks on the Librem 5, which is the model now included in our Lapdock Kit.

PureOS Crimson now includes Phosh’s Dark Mode.  To complement that, we backported dark mode support in Chatty.

We also fixed the AppStream metadata for PureOS Crimson.  AppStream is how tools like the PureOS Store find applications available to install – it’s a set of metadata describing those applications.

Leaving the station

After much anticipation, we could finally make the PureOS release!  We built and tested release candidate images for PureOS Crimson.  Once they were released, we updated pureos.net to reflect the Crimson release and worked with our Operations team to use PureOS Crimson for all new shipments.  The final step to release PureOS Crimson is a change to Byzantium – we published an update to Byzantium that will bring in PureOS Upgrade.  (We also made several more small improvements to PureOS Upgrade based on your feedback!)

With those steps done, PureOS Crimson is now available to all PureOS users – for new Librem hardware purchases, existing installations, and for custom installations on other hardware.

Speeding up

We’re already hard at work on PureOS Dawn, our next release based on Debian 13 “Trixie”.  The first steps are laying the foundations.  PureOS Dawn will include the latest Phosh shell, and for that we need to backport the latest dependencies.

Phosh includes many components:

• a compositor (“phoc”), which takes the images of the applications and composes them into the image you see on the display
• a shell (“phosh”), which draws user interface components including the status bar, app drawer, and pull-down settings menu
• applications, such as Calls, Chatty, Maps, and others, most of which are shared with GNOME

With that variety of components comes a variety of dependencies, especially as we walk down the tree to the next-level dependencies and further.  In May, we started updating some of the lowest-level dependencies:

• wlroots: tools for compositors
• cellbroadcastd: a service for cellular broadcasts
• gmobile: tools for mobile applications in GNOME, Phosh, and other GLib environments
• directx-headers: exactly what it sounds like – header files for DirectX libraries

That last one probably comes as a surprise to most readers – and no, the Librem 5 and Librem 11 do not use DirectX to render Phosh.  They do use the Mesa graphics stack, and Mesa needs these headers to build.  We’re bringing newer Mesa into PureOS Dawn to support the latest Phosh.

On toward a PureOS Dawn alpha

We’re already planning the work to get to an alpha release of PureOS Dawn for early testers to share feedback.  You can watch the work unfold in our PureOS Dawn Alpha milestone.

If you’re eager to try PureOS, but not experienced at installing operating systems, check out the Librem 16.  It is our latest product built for PureOS from the ground up, and sales of the Librem 16 fund PureOS development.

Thanks to all of our customers and PureOS subscribers for making this work possible!