Yes, I am focusing on using PureOS with Purism hardware because I spent a significantly larger amount of money (probably 100% more) for this setup compared to the alternatives. I have been purchasing from Linux friendly vendors for over a decade and I am a Linux sysadmin as one of my day jobs. Here is a good example of one of the issues I encountered:
The Librem Key is based on Nitro Key. One of the features of the nitro key is password management. I have seen questions on this forum and forums on other sites asking if password management works on the Librem Key. (e.g. Librem Key, practical usage scenarios). There has been no update to this in the FAQ or docs and not enough users tackling the issue to make the forum a good resource for the issue.
While the company staff is helpful things like this keep falling through the cracks. I’m hoping this thread will help me gather outstanding issues so I can post support tickets for Purism to address them. I’m not here to complain but to give constructive criticism. I could be doing other stuff that’s really important to me but I spend almost an hour researching and organizing when making these posts.
Other issues not mentioned above and off the top of my head that make long term use of PureOS challenging:
- librem key is locked by one process and not available to others
- Gnome login and screensaver can’t get librem key half the time
- Graphical SUDO prompt does not use librem key
- Heads still listed as beta and not supported in Librem docs (https://docs.puri.sm/PureBoot/Heads/Report_an_Issue.html)
- No link to report bugs for heads in docs. Had to post to forums to find site and have to dig it up if I need to do it again
- lack of Qubes + Librem Key + LUKS docs
If I use a different distro I lose the login screen intregration with librem key but I gain the use of all of those other apps that PureOS is protecting me from like 32bit and KDE and Plugins to Visual Studio Code. It is time to re-install again but I have to find a few hours to do that and dig through random pages and forum posts to decide if I want to try Qubes this time around. Seems from forum posts that Qubes + LUKS + Librem Key may be troublesome and there is no documentation on it.