Waste of resources to ship your own OS?

[sampablokuper]

@Caliga

PureOS is not about just rebranding something.

Purism was founded specificially to make it easy, even for non-technical people , to run 100% free, privacy protecting systems. This statement alone should make it clear that Debian is not the way to go. If it does not, have a look at the Purism freedom roadmap .
It might surprise you but Debian is actually not endorsed by the FSF . Here’s a list of endorsed distros , which is surprisingly short.

Purism strives for FSF endorsement for all their hardware and software, and therefore for PureOS 3 .

All of those points are easily addressed, with one word: Trisquel.

Trisquel is an FSF-endorsed distro that is:

• 100% free;
• actively developed;
• privacy-conscious;
• intended to be usable by non-technical people.

It is the distro offered by MiniFree on their FSF RYF-certified laptops (at the time of writing).

So, clearly, Purism does not need to spend resources on PureOS in order to achieve RYF certification.

Now, with the upcoming Librem 5, PureOS will also become a mobile OS, with built-in convergence.

Again, there does not seem to be a need for this. Replicant is a mobile operating system that is fully free and actively developed by privacy-conscious people.

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Purism is commendable in working to ship as-free-as-possible hardware, with hardware privacy protections (e.g. killswitches that actually work) and with libre, privacy-protecting firmware, that supports existing fully free OSes. But wouldn’t it be great if it focused on that exclusively, instead of spreading itself thin on userland software? PureOS development necessarily involves duplicating efforts of existing OS developers (e.g. in skinning) and requires Purism staff time to be spent deciding unimportant issues. Making genuinely privacy-protecting hardware and firmware is already a lot for a small company to do, especially when customer service is taken into account. Purism’s progress - although impressive - could be faster and more robust without PureOS as a distraction.

Here is a great example of something that Purism staff would not be wastingspending their time or Purism users’ time considering, if they were just shipping Trisquel as the OS with a Librem-focused Heads/Coreboot version underneath.