Clarity about the nature of PureOS

Software PureOS
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I just found puri.sm, and my first reaction was: it’s great and I want to support it.

But naturally I was curious about PureOS. What is it, exactly? Is it based on Debian? On Red Hat? Or is it a whole new independent distro?

Puri.sm should be upfront with this info, it should be on the landing page for puri.sm or for pureos.net. I had to dig around to reach the conclusion that it’s some kind of Debian derivative. But which Debian? Stable? Testing? Oldstable? I still don’t know. Sure I could find out by spending more time digging around but my point is that this info should be upfront, on the home page, not buried in wikis and repos.

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Fork of Debian, but doesn’t depend on Debian repos, ie they rebuild everything from source themselves. There are some nice tweaks here and there, provides an awesome experience on Librem devices. This means they have their own release cycle that is not Debian stable, testing or unstable.

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3

https://tracker.pureos.net/w/faq/

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4

Unfortunately (for historical reasons I guess),
the version numbers are a bit off / misleading:
Debian 10 (Buster) --> PureOS 9 Amber
Debian 11 (Bullseye) --> PureOS 10 Byzantinum

The main differences are:

When possible, these modifications are upsteamed, so the difference to Debian remains relatively small.

See https://puri.sm/posts/tag/pureos/

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5

PureOS uses the Libre-Linux-kernel out-of-the-box with their products so that means that binary-blobs or black-box code is ripped out-of-the-box from the Linux-kernel, meaning that there is NO support, officially, for non-freed-hardware / closed / proprietary hardware on the market …

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