Is there any reason to think it would run anything other than PureOS? Wouldn't you lose all the functionality they are talking about in the post if you installed another OS?
Why would you lose the functionality of hardware kill switches by running different software?
PureOS will no doubt be the best supported distribution but since the whole point of the phone is to be as open as possible and Purism aims to upstream as many of their changes as possible I expect it will be possible to run Debian with most functionality intact.
Yeah, they say "Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions." under "Security focused by design" on the product page (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/).
>Myself, I really want to get NixOS running on it.
Let's start a working group, stat! What a cool story it would be if we could say that we built images for the thing before it ever even shipped and had a one liner to emit new NixOS-based images for a Librem 5.
There is so much potential for experimenting with update models, read-only secondary secure OS partitions (combined with Nix's reproducability starts getting pretty compelling, in my opinion).
I go by the same name and am persistently in the Nix(OS) related IRC channels. Cheers.
There are some images of the phone on this page of their website [1]. Looks like a fairly clean generic phone really, other than having more physical side buttons than normal