Gnome Photos has an unusual issue. When I first installed pureos the photos application simply did not
start. i could click on the icon and the loading widget would show up. But the application would never start.
I tried resolving this by using software to uninstall and then reinstall the application. It didn't change anything.
I tried using the command line to start it up but it didn't even show the loading widget.
On using the command ps ax | grep photos, i am able to see the pid of photos.
I ended going to wiki,gnome.org and found installation instructions using flatpak. And voila, it started working now.
I realized However that flathub repo contains a lot of nonfree software. pureOS recently asked me to update and i thought that would make a difference. I even removed the flathub repository and tried installing photos from purisms repo. However the problem persisted.

Another issue was that i couldn't install Latexila through the software app either. but it worked through apt command.

the software app or maybe the repository has some bugs that need to be looked into