In September, we prioritized fixes for the out-of-box experience on PureOS Crimson. For the rest of the beta milestone, we are prioritizing work that benefits the most from user feedback. That includes functionality that must account for device-to-device variations and that is strongly influenced by users’ individual preferences.
More on: PureOS Crimson Development Report: October 2025 – Purism
Its not an some as others Phone from the mainstream, but for me its kind of stable. Good work PureOS and Community.
Privacy and transparency is worth some pile pile of money. Because in the wildlife everyone try to sell your data. So thank you Community and Purism for have this data or math haven.
Great to read this report again! I’ve been on Crimson for a while now for my daily driver. I did not encounter any issues that forced me to go back to Byantium.
I’ve learned about vibra feedback, and about improved Wayland compatibility, which I do not use myself.
Thanks to all who made this possible: developers, bug reporters, subscribers to the PureOS subscription, or anybody else to contributed!
I’m looking forward to the next report.
This statement is encouraging me to finally get my stuff together and finally reflash/upgrade.
Are you or can anyone confirm if calls/SMS/MMS work about as good as in Byzantium? I rely on my phone to be a phone for work. I assume all the rest works fine.
For me at least, they seem to work better! Call quality (audio) has seemed better for me.
People I talk to on L5 Crimson report much better audio quality. SMS works great, but MMS is worse – I often get notifications (new behavior) about failed/retrying send/receive MMS. To be fair, I’ve been unable to duplicate my Mint Mobile MMS settings, it keeps reverting to T-Mobile.
I think that a few times, I did not hear the ringing tone when calling someone, so the phone stayed silent but calling went fine, and when the person at the other side picked up audio worked fine.
Yesterday, I did a phone call with the headset plugged in, and the person at the other side complained about the audio. When I unplugged the headset audio worked fine. I’m not sure if this could be a Crimson specific issue. If I find time, I will test further.
Today, I did not get an 2FA SMS. Not sure if this was an issue with the website of the Librem 5. When I requested a new SMS, it arrived without issues.
I’ve no experience with MMS, as my provider does not support that, in the Netherlands MMS was never very popular, I think.
So the end verdict: I feel comfortable enough with Crimson now, but I’m always cautious that something might go wrong, but that was also the case with Byzantium.
That’s almost always the case when I dial out. I just figured that was the case for everyone.
It’s nice to get a vibration feedback fix. In case all the new vibration themes are already shipped:
Squeekboard has no feedback anymore. I know it is also the case on Mobian and so I don’t know where the bug is. But please fix this before Crimson becomes released (stable). I cannot tell if that bug was present on Crimson all the time or if it came with a specific update. OSK feedback is important.
Works for me. Feedback was broken for a while on crimson, but it’s been fixed with feedbackd 0.8.6-1pureos1~cri1 uploaded 2025-10-14.
feedbackd and libfeedback-0.0-0 are holding back. Do you remember when I was installing Crimson on the other thread? I never changed anything from that install, so the “hold back” is by default.
I could fix it by sudo apt install feedbackd. 0.2.1-1pureos1 was installed by default. To upgrade, two other packages had to be installed: libgmobile0 and libgmobile-common. Both got installed automatically with the command above, the first called packages become upgraded.
After doing that, haptic feedback works, thanks.
To perform a system upgrade, use apt dist-upgrade (or full-upgrade), not upgrade. upgrade alone won’t result in an up-to-date system.
Sorry, but shouldn’t the Crimson images not already be dist-upgraded? I did not think about it since I thought it’s already the latest (with maybe exceptions of common updates).
Otherwise it would be a good thing to have it mentioned on the blog posts.
This applies to all suites of PureOS, always, just like it always applies to Debian testing and sid. “dist-upgrade” differs from “upgrade” in that it will also install new dependencies of upgraded packages while “upgrade” will not. It’s nothing specific to crimson or any specific images.
This is a typical long time user / developer to kinda new user communication issue. I’m sure there are also others who do not use dist-upgrade/full-upgrade. Beside of L5 I’m using Debian stable, that’s why I came with another thought about this command. Anyway, thanks for clarification.