What’s new in PureOS 10
PureOS 10 is going to be our new release for the Librem 14, Librem 5, and Librem Mini. You may already be familiar with its code name “Byzantium” but what happens next is that it moves to our stable release and stops being our rolling release. This means that the character of updates changes from drinking from the firehose to a steady drumbeat of security and stability updates. It also means that it will have had some testing on our hardware and working with other Purism innovations like PureBoot. I’m writing this on my Purism Mini running PureOS 10 and I’ve never been so happy to eat my own dog food.
Aside from the myriad small changes in the various packages in PureOS, a number of rather large changes are worth mention. The most important is the way that GNOME applications have learned to adapt to multiple window sizes. The software library libhandy was built for our Librem 5 phone but works on all our devices. It enables the various chat, email, and other application windows to resize their contents to elegantly present the information inside them. While this has obvious uses on our phone, it can be useful on any device including your car or TV. Simply resize your libhandy enabled app and you’ll find you can use your laptop screen real estate efficiently without important info scrolling off the sides. All this magic is called “convergence”.
Convergence really means putting users back in control; it means that the time and effort a user invests in all the different metaphors and interfaces that operating systems have created over the last few decades will not be wasted. In addition, it can adapt and extend the metaphors that we use in “desktop” computing to the ubiquitous computing that we’re bound to see in the near future. In fact, convergence is appropriate wherever computing is going to be consumed by a user. After all, the concept of a speedometer is convergent. Yes, the colors change, but the idea that there is an indicator that travels a grid of some kind is universal, the metaphor of a speedometer is universal. As we keep those useful metaphors alive in PureOS we’ll help our users continue to leverage computing devices to do their bidding and not just be a set of fingers in the endless scroll.
