Oh dear, what ever has happened to PureOS?

The installer no longer lets you create a user: you get the default ‘guest’. And you still can’t encrypt, or even set the time zone.

The installation disk has shrunk to a CD and the only applications provided are Chromium and Gnome-Mplayer. At least they both work perfectly and have all the necessary plugins and codecs. For adding extra software, PureOS still relies entirely on Debian; but then, if they haven’t got it who has? I tried to add LibreOffice Writer, but only the complete package was listed. I then found OpenOffice Writer and asked for that: I got LibreOffice Writer! It did not give me a dictionary, and some of them are listed under Hunspell, others under Myspell. Once things are found, they do work, again courtesy of Debian. Using multiple keyboard drivers is now possible.

I then decided to do something about being ‘guest’. I logged in as root, created a new user (and I had to set all the necessary group memberships), removed ‘guest’, and disabled autologin. When I rebooted the computer, gdm hung. It hadn’t been reconfigured, still being set to automatically log-in as ‘guest’, so I had to edit /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf in tty1.

The value of PureOS was as a quick, simple installer for Debian, but it's now far less trouble to just go for Debian or Pinguy.