Has Purism Created a Walled Garden App Store

Software PureOS
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I recently erased and loaded a fresh installation of Pureos on my Librem 5 because the old installation completely filled the emmc space. The way the phone shipped to me, it was very easy to install and use flatpak and the Snap Store to install plenty of other apps, many of which ran well on the Librem 5.

I’ve spent the past few hours now, trying to install either/both of the Snap Store and flatpak. On the previous installation of Pureos (the one that shipped on the phone), in both cases it was as easy as running a sudo apt install command to install both the Snap Store and Flatpak. But that is not working now. From what appears to be the case, all of the required dependencies to install these two programs are tied to purism’s repositories, which all seem to be either too old or broken with respect to these two sources of apps.

For some reasons now, Flatpak is installed but can not run by GUI and doesn’t have any available programs to install. The Snap Store won’t run because I have an old version of snapd and purism’s repositories will not upgrade snapd to a high enough version to allow installation of the snap store. Somehow Purism’s app store appears to be tied to flatpak, perhaps using flatpak’s installed resources (not sure about that though).

It very much appears that I am stuck in a walled garden with access limited to the apps found in Purism’s app store. How can I escape this situation and start using these other two app stores?

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Please do not install this unmobile things for Librem 5. Please do not harm the Librem 5 with that garbage.

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There are two issues involved here:

1.) Many of those apps will install and run just fine and many of them (especially the CLI ones) will fit the screen perfectly.

2.) Did someone at Purism decide for me that I shouldn’t install those other programs, or do I still have the choice?

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I also recently realized that several of the 64-bit Raspberry Pi applications will install and run very well on the Librem 5. Many of them even closely match the Librem 5 screen as many Raspberry Pi applications need to run on small displays. Some won’t run on the Librem 5. But many of them run well on the Librem 5.

For example: Balana Ether is there and might be very helpful in cloning your PureOS on the phone to an SD card, or installing PostmarketOS to your SD card so you can do everything on your phone (no PC needed), to run PostmarketOS on your Librem 5 from SD card without needing to be an expert to make that happen (more or less download to SD card and reboot while holding the volume key up). I haven’t tried doing that yet. But that program responds when I open it and press a few buttons.

No one responded when I posted about some of the Raspberry Pi programs working on my Librem 5. I wasn’t sure what to think about that. But I’ll let this forum know more as I explore these other apps.

Meanwhile, I would prefer not to wait several years for the Librem 5’s app eco system to fill with more meaningful apps. There are good apps out there now.

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Haven’t tested this but the simplest explanation (Occam’s Razor) is that the culprit is time. Back then you had up to date (enough) dependencies and could install snap and flatpak and then they would update what they could. Now, the new versions are not able to function due to too old (byzantium) versions. It’s not a “walled garden”, it’s just broken - no malice intended. You could test that by making an install with backports and see how snap and flatpak work then as they get more up to date dependencies available. And did you remember to add the flathub as a source (which may be what your are missing, see PureOS – Flathubin määritys | Flathub), so that those apps would be available? The store also has had serious problems - you may wan’t to check other forum threads for that (it’s never functioned well for me) - luckily (according to some of the Crimson tickets) there is some work going on towards the store, but we’ll have to wait to see…

(Btw. That Rasberry info was interesting, but there just hasn’t been time for me at least to take a look [and won’t be soon])

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As stated above, you need two things:

  • you need the underlying package installed (true out-of-the-box?)
  • you need to point flatpak at one or more repositories of flatpaks

I think Purism offers its own flatpak repo but you may want to use other repos, in addition to or instead of.

I don’t know whether the following is up to date but: Introducing Flatpaks on PureOS – Purism

It is possible that the introduction of official support for flatpaks means that there is now an extra one-off step if you want to use flatpaks outside of the Purism repo but that is hardly a “walled garden”.

As @JR-Fi says … Someone’s Razor (maybe Occam’s Razor, maybe Hanlon’s Razor) … Hanlon’s roughly paraphrased for this particular scenario: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by an accident.

Snaps are basically pushed by Canonical and the current Ubuntu version is way ahead of byzantium in general package versions. So that would leave you with a lot of work to try to piece together a set of package versions that work on byzantium.

If you are dead set on using snaps then you should probably start by exploring whether crimson is a) going to work adequately for you and b) even solves the dependency problem. Otherwise you might be waiting for dawn.

I guess Purism is expressing in terms of strategic direction, or otherwise, a preference for flatpaks over snaps. So they are doing the work for flatpaks but not doing the work for snaps.

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I though that one was about incompetence (or stupidity). I didn’t want to assume (could be other reasons too, less complicated than creating intentional walls) :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the reply. I am trying several things at once and might wait a while before trying to resolve this issue, depending on how my PostmarketOS experiment goes.

On another note, in just the past few hours I have installed PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile on to an SD card. It’s easier than I suspected it would be and you don’t have to use a PC nor a USB cable. Just put an SD card in next to the SIM card and boot up the Phone. Then go to the postmarketos website and download an image of the latest revision made for the Librem 5. You unzip the image right in your Downloads folder in PureOS. Then run the dd command to flash to the SD card. Then hold the volume key down while rebooting in to PostmarketOS. The AI told me the dd options to use when flashing to an SD card. The first boot takes a long time which the AI says could take up to an hour when you use an SD card. Several partitions need to be made and formatted to fit the SD card size. Programs need time to optimize. I have a PostmarketOS logo and bouncing dots on the Librem 5 screen now. Hopefully everything fully boots.

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Aside: I don’t think I would ever rely on AI when using the dd command as, facetiously, dd stands for “destroy disk” or “disk danger” or …

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I saw your post at the time and didn’t follow up with trying it. My intuition about my Librem 5 is that its security model is based on everything being open source rather than extensive isolation such as we see in Android. As such, as a Librem 5 daily driver I feel that it might be to my benefit to only infrequently add new software to my device. My understanding was that the Raspberry Pi team was okay with integrating Microsoft and Azure as a default ppa for downloading packages because they wanted to have VScode easily available in Raspbian OS, which to me put the Raspberry Pi software distributors into a different camp of people than Purism in my head with regards to who they are and how they make decisions. That being said, in light of recent announcements from Purism, that separation in my head between those groups of people might be going away.

I aspire to not use snaps or flatpaks, just using apt for stuff or compiling it myself where possible. This may go hand-in-hand with using a minimal subset of things on my devices compare to the whole of what exists in the world.

But anytime I open command line on my Librem 5 and run g++ and know that it is not emulation or in a container but is actually running on my device in the same sense as my other PureOS applications, I am left feeling that this is very much not the same sort of “Walled Garden” as the Apple and Google universe.

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I totally get your approach dlonk. I didn’t realize that so much of the Raspberry stuff was Microsoft and other closed source. I’ve had my Librem 5 for several years now (was a part of the initial multi-year backlog on the Librem 5), and just want to start using my Librem 5 more.

By the way, I also have another question for you since you have experience making bootable SD cards. I imaged an SD card with a PostmarketOS build that was made for the Librem 5, a few hours ago. For the first try at booting it, I ended up with the PostmarketOS logo on the screen and some bouncing balls on the screen. After an hour, I killed that, reflashed the SD card, and tried again with the same result. How long should I let that run before I decide that something is wrong? I have heard that the partition resizing to fit the limits of the card can take a while.

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Although I have reinstalled PureOS on my SD cards a few times, I never actually put in the effort to stray outside of that and use PostmarketOS. As a result, I don’t have knowledge to help diagnose that specifically. But what I would try if I were you is to put PureOS onto an SD card first and see if that works then you know PostmarketOS was the issue in this particular case. At least with PureOS, similar to how F12 on a desktop will take away the splash screen and show the systemd startup sequence and all of the logs about which part of the system is starting up and how much time it is taking, in likewise manner on PureOS during boot on the Librem 5 we can press Volume Down (after the beginning when it chooses whether to use SD card) and in the later stage of booting this Volume Down button will take away the splash screen and instead show that same systemd screen with all the log lines about which services are starting. If you’re lucky maybe PostmarketOS has the same feature. In either case, if you can get to that screen, maybe it would tell you what it is doing that takes so long. I don’t recall my SD card booting taking particularly long, although it boots slightly slower than from the eMMC.

Don’t trust me on this, it’s probably better to do your own research. I was being a bit secondhand. I went and looked it up a little and I think what I was referring to was actually more of a one-time scandal which allegedly has not been repeated – so at that time, in that situation, all the Raspberry Pi OS instances on the planet upgraded themselves to add Microsoft as a ppa and package distributor without informing the users. But in the present day, if you install Raspberry Pi OS, maybe Microsoft isn’t there anymore at this time. (Other folks online are more informed about this than I am; I was able to find some good discussions by simply searching “raspbian microsoft”)

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Thanks Dlonk,

Eventually, I will put Pureos on to an SD card. I went back and read the postmarketos documentation a bit more thoroughly. Apparently, pmbootstrap has to be installed on to the pureos on the librem 5, or on to a pc if using another device to build the SD card installation with. Fortunately, it is very convenient to do everything on the librem 5 in Pureos with an SD card installed. Then with pmbootstrap installed, there is a terminal command that prepares the SD card to install postmarketos. I missed that part up until now. I went to install pmbootstrap this morning and both the postmarketos and Purism’s github sites require a user name and password. So I’ll have to sign up and make up a password before I can install pmbootstrap either way. I’ll post to this forum with clear instructions when I get postmarketos working on my librem 5.

The instructions on the postmarketos website are somewhat clear. But the Librem 5 specific information is not so clear until a person gets past a small learning curve. But now that I think I might know enough about it, that it’ll probably be a ten-minute process that should be easy for anyone to do, given specific instructions. I am hoping that Plasma Mobile on PostmarketOS might have a better app ecosystem and possibly a more mainstream application development environment.

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That sounds strange to me. Installing PureOS onto my SD card did not require me to create a login with anyone, so I do not know why installing PostmarketOS to an SD card would require creating a login. If true, that makes me much less inclined to want to try PostmarketOS in the future.

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Yes, I am surprised that Purism engages in this damned sign up, get a password, and login to gain access crap. The pmbootstrap software is in Purism’s github area also. And Purism expects a login to get access also. You can’t get to the software without signing up and giving them a verifiable email address. I am sure that someone somewhere will claim that signing-in “enhances the user experience”. But I don’t want anything special in my user experience. I just want my command line to work without stopping to ask me for a user name and password that I don’t have, that’s all. Now I have to wonder why purism wanted my email address and what they plan to do with it. That puts Purism on the Google/Microsoft/Apple side of the privacy aisle. Purism, tear down that wall.

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Two points:

  1. github has been getting worse and worse over the past several years by more and more features not workiing properly on public repositories unless signed in to github. It has nothing to do with the repository owner.
  2. Purism essentially stopped actively updating its github repositories many years ago and changed to gitlab. It’s a 2 edged sword, but I personally think it is a feature rather than a bug to leave the github site/repositories up rather than removing them. They should put up a prominent banner, but most of the repos are marked as “archived”, which means they will never be updated. Most of them were last updated over 8 years ago.
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Do you have a link to what you’re talking about?

I installed PureOS on my SD card without doing any of the sign ups that you’re talking about, at all, anywhere, ever. Nothing from Purism asked from a login. None of it tried to stand in my way

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I think some apps in the PureOS repos are flatpaks but possibly not on the latest versions. You can add the Flathub repo if you want a wider selection of apps:

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github is a service for git from m$, gitlab is both of its own service and a product that can be copied for doing basically the same game on any server, and both purism and postmarket use gitlab, but git is the main thing, it is the version control system (vcs) as their core part… when u want to download from these sites, u have options for downloading a tar/zip archive, or using git at your terminal, where u can use https or git as protocol, where the former is accessible without an accout on any of these 3 mentioned and other git-based platforms, while the git protocol requires you to set up an account with an ssh key for authentication, and the latter protocol provides more abilities… i guess this is what u saw there… but im nowhere near to be a git expert, just had some half-baked attempts to play this game from terminal…

i use postmarketos with sxmo on my pinephone, i know they support librem 5 too, but not how much readily and as expected… im yet to familiarize myself seriously with pmbootstrap, but it should run basically on any sort of linux… i would work out my way myself the hard way, but i suggest u to find an instant communication channel to them like irc, and ask for help/resources/troubleshooting there, as thats probably the fastest way to achieve what u want…

sxmo is nice, hacker friendly, and it saves much battery, but it has a learning curve, and we cant expect purism to go that way, and make a phone mainly for hackers, but making a real linux phone is like that currently, no matter how much sugar is added… u need patience, and to go near to the right community (i like this community, but i mean where the devs hang out :smiley: … or discuss their development stuffs…) everything else can only boost and make u more independent, but this is fine… nobody seriously need to know english or coding, but patience, trial&error, cooperation and orientation…

btw dd isn’t required for flashing, when there is curl (or wget), and compressors can operate on data streams, u can flash iso’s with curl, right from the internet to its destination, u still only need to take serious care about its destination… like i did this:

curl https://images.postmarketos.org/bpo/v23.06/pine64-pinephone/sxmo-de-sway/20240122-0322/20240122-0322-postmarketOS-v23.06-sxmo-de-sway-1.14.0-pine64-pinephone-installer.img.xz | pixz -d >/dev/mmcblk2

just don’t take it literally, but as an example… :smiley: and the tools shoud be installed… :smiley:

note that i had broken stuffs here and there from time to time, i guess debian (behind pureos) is way more stable, but thats just a different trap… :smiley: devuan (no-systemd debian) probably has a larger team than purism, and they always lagged behind debian seriously, and when i used debian on a small partition, then point release filled it in the middle and then nothing good followed… btw i use void linux as my main os, but i like alpine too, just not that much, but maybe 1 day i will enjoy it on my pinephone too… :smiley: (while i will see alpine on my visionfive 1.0 (my other gem) sooner than void in place of the current ubuntu…..)

back to installing pmos, u should know that there is/was a rewrite of the installer, and having full disk encryption again means u used the newer one, i had to download an older iso with the old installer when i realized this (absence of fde), and then i could update it, which was new at the time, otherwise ppl reflashed it at every release before that X’D

back to pureos, and the choice of depending on debian, i think a rolling release distro with removed proprietary components could be better for the case of too big point release upgrades, but their development branch could be used the same way with package pinning/downgrading, and/or with any means of system rollback (btrfs/whatever :smiley: ) can do the trick, just go nearer to the development in case of need… otherwise they did most of their work on their apps (or i believe so), which are packaged elsewhere too, and even if they have the debian base for main development, they could open up their path to other distros, so they could win independence, but sure it is continuous extra work, and they are a small team, but they have a big community, and many ppl around already took much of these steps, and there are means to contribute howto/code… it can only become yet another selling point…

btw, purism folks, for ur benefit, u have this awesome community, guide them toward contribution as ur second nature, and u will see how much manpower u really have! :slight_smile: like by answering with links to opened issues with cross reference to the forum, and then they will see how things work “behind the scenes“… already having things/methods like this is one thing, including them in ur advices/habits is an another… on the contrary, maybe it is better to keep most of the community on the forum, as it would increase the noise level around development, which might slow it down, but i still guess that it can be done right…

+maybe some other things i forgot to write, but wanted to… :smiley:

(edit: minor corrections)

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