Hi guys,
I came across the best and secure GNU Linux OS which called PureOS. I read the “About page” and Warrant page but when I started to “Get involved” and then “Download page” I has been redirected to “Etcher” and then to Balena page.
Please answer the question bellow:
What is it all about and why do I have to pay my hard worked money to balena in order to install your OS?
Is there any donation page?
You can donate to Purism with their donate item in their shop: Donate – Purism
The minimum donation is 5 USD, though if you’d like to donate more, you can just increase the quantity.
Can I just simply send some money?
I believe it is free as in “beer.”
You only need to do anything with Etcher or Balena or who knows what if you are coming from a Windows environment. To escape from the clutches of Microsoft, you need to be able to do the following from within Windows: download Linux (any distro) and create a bootable medium that will install Linux.
Once you have one working Linux computer, it is so much easier to make more working Linux computers.
If this is going to be difficult for you, it can help to find anyone you know (and trust) who runs Linux already and just get that person to give you a suitable USB flash drive.
To be honest, I escaped from the clutches of Microsoft more than a decade ago, so I have no idea what the procedure for doing so is these days.
If you want to donate to Purism then I suggest doing so from your working PureOS install i.e. once you have succeeded!
I’m unsure of what you are asking but I think the answer is: it’s just a generic ordering page and hence, yes, it makes no sense at all in the context of donating. There is no product and there is no shipment (hence no shipment address). If you are paying by Credit Card then Purism would legitimately need to know the billing address.
From the Purism FAQ, no, cash is not accepted.
It isn’t really recommended to send cash through the post anyway.
That said, if you do post them cash and you are in the US (or you at least send US dollars) and a postal worker doesn’t just trouser it, I don’t expect that Purism is going to send it back. 
Yes. You don’t have to pay anything - like most Linux distros. Download, install, and away you go.
Personally though if you plan to install Linux on random unspecified hardware, I wouldn’t say that PureOS is the best choice of Linux distro.
Yes, echoing this. @den2, PureOS is a perfectly fine distro (for the hardware it will run on) but there is a lot of hardware it will not work well with, because that HW requires proprietary drivers to work well.
What PC/specs are you using that you’re considering PureOS for? I am sure someone here can tell you if it will work well or not for you.
If it doesn’t, there are plenty of good options for other, very similar Linux distros that will likely work perfect on your hardware.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you mean Ubuntu or RedHat derived repos?
I mean, Ubuntu and RedHat aren’t really my jam, but I am hesitant to recommend distros to people.
Linux Mint is probably excellent, but I’ve never used it personally so I feel weird to be the one to recommend that. But from what I see online, it’s great especially for Windows-converts.
Fedora is also excellent from what I hear, but again, I’ve never used it personally.
I use Ubuntu on most regular x86 desktops / laptops. It is more likely to work well on random unspecified hardware than PureOS. I also have Mint on one or two computers. I use Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi devices.
Including PureOS, all four operating systems are in the Debian family. So they have a fair amount of similarity with each other.
