The Librem 14 comes with new software — here’s some of the new things coming your way
PureOS 10 is going to be our new release for the Librem 14, Librem 5, and Librem Mini. You may already be familiar with its code name “Byzantium” but what happens next is that it moves to our stable release and stops being our rolling release. This means that the character of updates changes from drinking from the firehose to a steady drumbeat of security and stability updates. It also means that it will have had some testing on our hardware and working with other Purism innovations like PureBoot. I’m writing this on my Purism Mini running PureOS 10 and I’ve never been so happy to eat my own dog food.
Does it mean that waiting more for the Debian Bullseye to become a thing is no more an option? (Bullseye has not been hard frozen for the release yet).
It would be useful to see a list of specific changes users can expect to run into. I found that the blogpost is vague on what’s going to change between Amber and Byzantium. I took Byzantium for a test drive several months ago, but didn’t do any in-depth testing, so the main thing I noticed was very superficial: several of the icons in Byzantium are ugly compared with the corresponding ones in Amber (kind of similar to the way macOS Big Sur made app icons more abstract and less distinguishable from each other). However, there are probably several important practical changes that only become apparent when the OS is in production use – users would benefit from knowing what to expect.
The blogpost talks a lot about “convergence”. I’m a bit nervous about what that means for laptop and desktop users. A long-standing problem with GNOME is that many of its design features are optimized for small, touchscreen devices, and sub-optimal for a large screen + pointing device (trackpad or mouse). A move away from “mobile-first” design towards “mobile-only”, so to speak, that already started about a decade ago. It’s an industry-wide trend, driven by the fact that the market for smartphones is at least ten times the market for laptops + desktops. But the GNOME project has taken this “war on usability” to extremes* (though Microsoft’s brief experiment with Windows 8 - Metro was worse). I haven’t tried KDE Plasma yet, so I don’t know how it compares.
*Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been using PureOS Amber - GNOME a lot; It works fine, despite the annoyances. And I don’t mean to disrespect the hard work that went into libhandy, etc. I just wish developers would think more about usability, and realize that imposing the limitations of a phone onto a laptop or desktop comes across as a bit perverse.
We started shipping PureOS 10 on Librem Mini v2 and now Librem 14 because the newer CPUs needed a newer kernel than PureOS 9 provided. Instead of modifying the PureOS 9 installer to include a backported kernel we decided to start shipping PureOS 10 instead because even though it’s still in a “testing” state, it is getting stabler by the day as changes start to freeze.
But to answer your other question, yes PureOS 10 will track Bullseye’s release path in general. We simply published this blog post now because Librem 14s are going out with PureOS 10 on them and we wanted to publish a post telling people who are receiving their Librem 14s some of the changes in PureOS 10.
I’m glad. Tracking Debian stable and making the tweaks that you make is what gives PureOS its strength (albeit that it also means its very much misunderstood by those seeking to denigrate your work - which I find totally bizarre).
Debian Bullseye gnome edition is looking to be the very best version for desktop yet and if you were moving off it I would probably just move to it instead, especially as stable makes the best use of Heads/Pureboot.
I think your default software choices for PureOS are a bit odd, especially shipping Thunderbird instead of Evolution + Geary, and thus not making best use of Gnome online accounts and integration with Librem One and Nextcloud. But I’ve experienced definite value using PureOS vs stock Debian, so I’m very glad to be able to stick with it, and very much looking forward to the proper release of PureOS 10!
