Well the back light is 100% the whole time. So I mean it is still usable. Gestures aren’t the end of the world either. So I mean Windows work, it is just on a laptop under battery power not being able to control the back light means your battery life is always going to be atrocious.
PUREOS only because it FORCES me to learn more. I know so little. I can only offer $ and conversations with any one who will listen to enable me to tell more folks about FSF, Aaron Swartz, DemandProgress, Rootstrikers, TheNewHampshireRebellion & EqualCitizens.Us. It’s all the same mission to me.
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I use Arch on my L15V4 with SwayWM.
I used to run qubes but reverted to debian. Life’s complicated enough.
well… i needed a recent enough browser, recent enough openscad, bluetooth support
so had no choice than to add debian repos to the pureos ones…
broke purebrowser, but well, i needed now videoconferencing too, and that was possible only with a genuine firefox, so…
I never understood the need to fork their own browser to begin with. Browsers are really complicated beasts today, and given the work load the small team at Purism already has, I just don’t see this as even remotely feasible. I mean there are entire companies and teams working on browsers.
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hi all! 
1st of all, feel free to correct me if i say anything wrong! 
this thread sounds like it would be nice to add some official howto/helpers to let ppl easier hack their packages and repos without the need to learn all the depths of apt dpkg &co…
using ubuntu, debian and popos sounds somewhat unreasonable when the delay between deb testing and the rest is insignificant; fedora &co arent much different imho, but ive got no enough knowledge about them to say that for sure
these are more or less straightforward to be replaced with pureos, and these are the reason that i made me say howtos and helpers would be good to bring/keep more ppl on board
qubes is just basically a supervisor where pureos and whatever else can still take its place, so i think its not necessary to talk about it (by myself…)
things like arch gentoo and void are different beasts and the debian funds wont really be able to bring their spirit…
there is https://bedrocklinux.org/ out there that can mix all of these (with all of the good and the bad consequences, while its not really for the basic users) that can be a thing to help ppl to use pureos and some bits from here and there, but its also a gateway to have a different base system…
actually i found void linux to be the best fit for my wishes (alpine isnt that bad either ), cuz theres no systemd, and theres musl… about systemd (that has never actually bite me, but its still a nasty bloatware imho ), sure, it can be changed in debian &co, but then u r on ur own to solve a lotsa issues, support wont come ootb, packages will needed to be modified, etc… maybe devuan, but i think thats still far from being fresh, even if i havent check out the fresh 3.0… the same stands for gentoo and musl, sure, there is “support” for even more clibs than that, but in reality, thats just a possibility of the infrastructure, but not much more, no polished and well tested musl variant for everything is included, so the infinite possibilities of gentoo comes with too much diy stuffs, and it seems like nobody took the responsibility for the whole, but for bits only… theres really much effort behind making everything work without systemd and with musl, so thats really a matter of picking a distro for it, but changing distro cuz 1-2 high level apps that can be compiled from source and even packed, or cherry-picked from a different repo isnt a big deal… on the contrary bad maintenance and higher level of instability with much broken packages are real things, but that would require more manpower for pureos…
the other thing im wondering about, is the convergence stuff, for the phone, its an important thing to have those apps like such, for the desktop its meaningless, and thats the perspective of the endusers, but its good for development, and the greatest selling point of that is to make everything as much interoperable between the phone and the others as possible, like how apple did, thats the best thing they have done, but nope, i was never an apple user (or nope, once i got apple earphones as a gift, but i clearly hated it, i prefer silicon earplugs, so i passed it on forward to a 3rd owner ) … however these are still basically about a bunch of freestanding apps that can be packaged for any os, as i even see one of the apps of purism in the void packages
pureos is basically about two things: convenience to not depend on others, and ryf cert. and i believe it would be the best to focus on the apps instead of the distro, and make only a custom installer that will set up the alternatives and a smooth base system, and that would be enough, and the question that would remain is only the ryf cert, but there are a lotsa ryf certificated distros out there if im right, and making an installer/live media would be enough, besides a simple repo that only handles the custom stuffs… but whatever…
i hope i could say anything valuable between the lines…
all the bests to all of u dear freedom fighters around here!
Qubes OS 4.x on my 15v4, and Kali on my 15v3.
Qubes runs great on the current hardware. A quad-core CPU would make it more optimal.
Haha. That’s fair enough. It was touch and go for me for the couple of tries - install Qubes, then install another OS over it after I got frustrated with something simple like network printing, then go back. But frankly, once I got my AppVM environment figured out - I can actually get into a state of flow while working in Qubes. I cannot adequately describe it.
And for what it’s worth - I really like PureOS and if I wasn’t using Qubes, PureOS would likely be my choice.
I may give it a try again some day, I quite liked the ideas behind it.
Manjaro Gnome Stable - How-to is not really needed, went right on thanks to openness.
73% use other Linux distros, 18% use PureOS, 9% use other OSes (I’m guessing OpenBSD), and none are willing to admit that they use Windows.
Either Purism should stop developing PureOS for their laptops, or you guys aren’t a representative sample. I’m guessing that that people who read the forums more geeky than the average Librem 13/15 user, so they are more likely to install another distro.
One thing that is interesting is that PureOS now has the highest page hit ranking (49th out of 275, over the last six months) on DistroWatch of any the 100% free distros and it is beating UBports. (Unfortunately DistroWatch doesn’t list embedded and mobile distros like postmarketOS, LuneOS and Nemo to see how it is doing against other OSes on phones). Pop!_OS, however, at 12th is far more popular than PureOS.
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There is certainly a selection bias - both in terms of who reads the forum but also in terms of who reads this particular topic / bothers to participate in the poll.
I bought by Librem 15 with the intention of installing Qubes, but then I started using it for work and have stuck with PureOS and have been quite happy.
The point of PureOS is to have a distro which is preconfigured for security and doesn’t contain any proprietary software. If all Purism wanted was a different app selection, it would just make a Debian image with the apps it wants installed.
Small nitpick:
PureOS is an FSF-approved distro because it contains 100% free software.
FSF’s Respects Your Freedom is a certification program for hardware that contains 100% free software. The Librem 13/15 can’t get this because they contain the Intel microcode, VBIOS, Firmware Support Package and Management Engine, which are proprietary. The Librem 5 is trying to get the RYF certification, which basically means keeping proprietary firmware out of the Linux file system (in places like /lib/firmware) and making sure that any proprietary code will be executed in secondary embedded processors. This means that U-Boot will read the proprietary DDR RAM timing code from an SPI Flash chip and execute it on the separate Cortex-M4 core. It means select parts such as the cellular modem, WiFi/Bluetooth, GNSS, USB DP, IMU, light sensors, whose proprietary firmware is stored on the individual components.
I suspect that most Librem 13/15 users are just going to install Firefox anyway and ditch Purebrowser.
Now that Purebrowser is based on Epiphany, it won’t be nearly as difficult to maintain, because Epiphany is much better about accepting changes upstream than Mozilla. The issue is that Epiphany has very limited configuration options and no plugins, so I don’t think it is an adequate browser for the desktop, although it is fine for a phone.
Epiphany is a pretty nice browser, but it doesn’t do a great job of rendering a bunch of more current websites. It needs a lot of work still, and the pace of its development is abysmally slow.
I am pulling for it, far more than I pull for Firefox, but patience isn’t my strong suit.
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i forgot about the security config, but that can be also done via an installer, i just checked out the internals of d-i 1-2 days ago, and its all about extensibility…
i know that pure os is ryf certed, i was only about my theoretical case
anyways, i was only about thinking out loud, in the hope that i could say anything useful between the lines, but thats all