I full-upgraded, but unfortunately the problem is still there.
Is it risky to switch to Debian repos? Can (and actually should) I just switch back at a later point? I think I’ll try it, since it’s my only hope at this moment. 
It’s just upgrade gnome-shell and dependencies from Debian unstable and then remove this repo you will be using pureos byzantium repos after this, I did it from Debian testing to unstable.
Do you know how to add repositories from terminal? I’m on the phone right know and takes a while to type this down.
PS. I just though that Debian testing is fixed now maybe it’s better install that gnome-shell or speak with PureOs team because they should update this packages
I don’t know, but I can look for explanations myself later and let you know if I have problems. 
Edit:
So I changed the repository to deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free.
Now I can boot and login, but the shell won’t open any software. Nothing will show up. Do I have to update gnome-shell still? Or did I miss something else? Already tried updating and upgrading through Ctrl + Alt + F3, but that didn’t help.
Same problem here. After update i cant get x to start.
Also: i cant log in on the non X side. Have my authentication configured such that it requires a yubikey. The yubikey never lights up.
Typing my password in plain text into the login field to check if the keyboard setup is correct shows me the characters ‘A turn into ~A and an invert exclamation mark. Apologies for the strange typing, but im on my tablet.
Any help would be most appreciated.
By the way: my drive is encrypted with gpg and a librem key, on the recovery shell it asks me for a password and not for the pin, woudl this be my gpg password?
I think I found the problem
Gnome shell is unable to update in the Byzantium repo
https://software.pureos.net/package/excuses/8390d15e-bf5a-4b6e-8843-be2a876591d5
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@Linuxnoob I just tried upgrading gnome-shell to the version in Debian - and it worked just fine - Thanks! I had to upgrade quite some packages though.
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So my main problem now is:
How can i update gnome. Meaning: how can i fix my login / yubikey problem or how can i mount my gpg encrypted luks main drive on a usb bootable linux to deactivate the pam yubikey enforcement
I did this also - but it was way over my head. It took me 5 hours to finish it and reboot into PureOs (now welcoming screen says Debian 10)
It would be great if the devs would fix this issue soon in byzantium so that I can enable the byzantium repo again.
But I have to say, it’s an amazing feeling having accomplished the task and fixed the problem. 
Hints for others: Chroot, decrypt LVM-Containers and you need at least another PC from which you can prepare a bootable PureOs USB stick and lookup the steps.
Gnome-Shell 3.36 looks really nice though.
Crap, I upgraded too and now it doesn’t boot anymore (Librem 15 v4). No login screen comes up. Only a black screen with the mouse cursor. I can go into the console with Ctrl-Alt-F2 but that’s all. No graphical interface anymore.
Doing a /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop and /etc/init.d/gdm3 start gives a “Something went wrong, contact a system administrator” screen. I’d rather not try to mix in Debian packages, as I don’t want to risk ending up in an even more inconsistent state. But hope this will be solved soon 
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What did you upgrade? gnome-shell from Debian testing? how did you do this?
The way I did it was:
sudo su
echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ testing main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debiantesting.list
apt update
apt -t testing install gnome-shell
rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debiantesting.list
apt update
I did from unstable really because I’m using Debian testing and when I did it it wasn’t fixed yet.
PS: This is just a workaround do it under your own resposability.
I don’t know if @jeremiah is aware about this
If your system is working don’t update it until this is fixed.
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You could try to debug it using the systemd debug shell after disabling the messages written to it.
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@ChriChri I managed to solve my problem described above without the need for this - But your hint is greatly appreciated, I am sure it might be useful for me later. Thank you!
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In case somebody has the same problem as I described above, i.e., that you cannot log in to the shell after switching away from X by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F2. My password can apparently not be entered successfully because I’m somehow using an unsupported string of special characters. This by itself is wild already…
Anyway, I ended up working around this issue by booting into the recovery shell. From there I created a new user by running
adduser username
Set a simple® password, then add this user to the sudo group by running
usermod -aG sudo username
Now I can at least log in with this new user on the shell and do everything, but still no fix to X not loading. Any update? Any other solutions than switching over to debian testing? Also, could this easily be undone once the PureOS repos are fixed / the problem is solved?
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not to sound out of touch, is everyone trying this because pureos amber is not being updated, or that byzantium will take a long time to fully integrate? is it recommended to try this or to wait for offiicial pureos to move to byzantium?
PureOS byzantium is based on Debian testing that comes with newest packages (and problems) the best is to stay in PureOS amber if you don’t need/want a ‘cutting edge’ system and you don’t want to deal with a broken system.
PureOS Amber will be always Amber.
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thank you for the reply. so at some point down the road, those running pureos amber will be able to upgrade to a (stable) pureos byzantium?
Yes and no, Amber is Amber always but the packages in Byzantium will be in Amber when they are enought stable to avoid this kind of errors
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This is not quite accurate example. Packages would not go from B to A automatically, only minor version/patchlevel upgrades. Major version bump wont go, they will rather to to the next stable release (if any). For those packages which bumped to next major there will only be backports of necessary features and security mitigations. But again feature backport most likely only if it applies to older codebase, no one will be spending hours to re-implement the feature if upstream codebase diverges significantly.
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so when byzantium becomes stable, a full upgrade from amber is the recommended step? (for those who require high stability)
Byzantium will become the new stable at some point, and there will be a new rolling release
But definitely not yet.
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