When and how to jump to crimson

Switched to Crimson with my daily drive device today, too. In general all was working well, Gapless even replaced Lollypop and I am more happy with this player.

But some drawbacks exist:

  1. When closing apps via app overview, the haptic feedback (vibration) is half the length as it was before. This result in a super short feedback that feels kinda broken/killed. I expect the same feedback as starting applications.
  2. Double tap of Nautilus is broken. I consider to backport it from Trixie.
  3. The Squeekboard layout switcher got randomized.
  4. Keyboard layouts on settings cannot be dragged & dropped to reorder. However this will be solved in later GNOME software versions and as minor bug I would just ignore this.
  5. The sliders are broken (not even solved in Forky). In Byzantium I can touch the slider, it becomes big and centered to the finger. On Crimson or later it stays thin and is super hard to touch. @dos if there is a way to fix it, please do it. It applies to all GTK-software except Phosh itself.
  6. I got asked to rename the English named home sub folders to my native language and agreed. Files inside old folders stay in the old folder, so I had to move them manually. More an information than an issue.
  7. (Edit) It is the first Nautilus version with less space for folders and files - a design decision of GNOME I really hate about. No matter the screen scaling, there is less space for at least one element each row. This is still the case in Mobian Forky.

No other issue found, yet. Not tested calls and SMS. My customized squeekboard and Phosh are still working as usual (this will change with Dawn).

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You referred to Mobian forky several times. Where or how are you running/testing forky? I’m running forky on my L5 as my daily driver and it has been fine. I’ve noticed some quirks here and there. Overall, it doesn’t feel as solid as PureOS, for instance, even though I have shuffle keypad set for login, on the first login every reboot, it is NOT shuffled?! If I lock device and unlock, the keypad is shuffled. But, things like that aside, it seems to be working fine.

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Because of these “quirks” (and also the high update frequency) I do not daily drive it. For instance Squeekboard is currently broken and while Stevia is a fine keyboard, I am at least 3 times slower with, if not more (personal preferences and work flow). I have a second device where I run Mobian. In additional I enable Phoshs nightly builds.

Keyboard shuffle is user bound and the first time you start your device you are not logged into your local user account. You could create an issue on Phoshs Git page (check if there isn’t already one), otherwise devs may do not think about.

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phosh-mobile-settings is the recommended go-to for OSK configuration (including keyboard layouts) as that app knows which layouts are available in the OSK and only displays those, and these are also reorderable via drag and drop. (that’s also why stevia opens that panel nowadays).

The issue here is that squeekboard doesn’t export the necessary layout list and hence p-m-s can’t pick it up but it would be relatively easy to add once squeeboard puts that file into the right location. It would basically mimic /usr/share/phosh-osk-stevia/layouts.json and we’d need to tell p-m-s to look at /usr/share/squeekboard/layouts.json too.

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Your initial login is via Phrog on Mobian, and that dropped that a while back, see Remove keypad shuffle quick setting by samcday · Pull Request #113 · samcday/phrog · GitHub , also something that’s easy to fix by writing a quick toggle

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You forget that we are speaking about Crimson. Its version is the super old 0.34.0, which does not include any of the settings you named. No layouts, no scaling, no text completing … nothing except “enable osk” setting.

However it is a good hint for the later version. I think Dawn will run on 0.46 and I am not sure if these settings are already implemented at this point (I think only scaling is, but I could be wrong).

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I was thinking about Dawn indeed, sorry for the confusion Dawn has most of this, albeit lacking a bunch of relevant fixes in that area (which could be backported though as they’re relatively small)

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Crimson beta seems pretty close…

Upgrader app is waiting for an icon.

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If it takes this long to make crimson, how long will the dawn be ready in the alpha? Or it is going to be very fast after crimson

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I believe that is the plan. The elapsed time for crimson to dawn will be much less than the elapsed time for byzantium to crimson. That’s not a commitment though and in any case I have no authority to commit on behalf of Purism.

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The last issue on this PureOS Crimson GR: Beta test, upgradable from Byzantium ¡ PureOS ¡ GitLab is now closed and pureos-upgrade package is marked beta (from alpha), so it seems we are pretty close to beta release.

Final release will milestone is 70% complete OKR 2026: PureOS Crimson GR: General release, replace byzantium in shipping ¡ PureOS ¡ GitLab

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