Yes, GNOME Software requires an internet connection on its first run, and display a "please wait" message while it is refreshing. If none is there, I don't know exactly what happens, but I guess the SC being empty is the result.
There is no need to run apt update manually.

With the 2017-08-03 snapshot ISO it appears this is not the case. Perhaps one should first connect to the internet before starting Software center for the first time?

Please, remove any wallpaper with a rectangle so we avoid any feedback from the FSF. The Purism rectangle is the logo they don't want to see in the OS. I plan to do a proper logo for PureOS and have a few wallpapers based on this logo for future builds.

I removed a couple of branded wallpapers, some which contain abstract rectangles still remain. https://github.com/purism/pureos-artwork/commit/6ac75ec8ab5b9c019ed414cfc5607f917d2057f7

Hmm, xdg-user-dirs is present and therefore this should work.
I'll need to look at what the shell does here when I'm back home.

Can the pictures with just rectangles stay?

When running the live usb key, the directories are not present neither. It is maybe related?
I think that they should be present in order to show the user who is testing the OS before installing that those essential directories exist in the distro.

Weird... Could be a GNOME bug. So far, I haven't managed to reproduce this, but this bug is currently blocked on the OEM installer freeze issue.

Requires direct patches in live-build, which is a bit more involved (I'll do it when there is time).

This is related to the keyboard-not-working issue, which is incredibly persistent. We tracked it down to the expat package in Debian, but there seem to be more components involved, making it hard to pin down the issue.

This particular bug should be resolved now - please verify!

This is somehow related to systemd: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6483
It does work occasionally on Debian though, so it appears like I need to put some further work into debugging this issue.
Meanwhile, I could patch the systemd package in order to disable the service that causes trouble for us by default (which is not a proper fix though).
I'll do some further experiments.

Can you please try again with a more recent image? There have been multiple kernel updates meanwhile.

I reproduced this installing PureOS via Calamares on a Librem 15v3.

@mak , the Purism branded wallpapers are still present in the 08/03 ISO and they should be removed.

After trying on a new install on a Librem 13 v2, the dirs are not present even after a system upgrade.

While it was DDG before, in the meantime somehow that became a *not* true statement.
https://tracker.pureos.net/T156

Hydrogen-compatible XML feed with only DFSG-free drumkits are now established at http://freepats.zenvoid.org/hydrogen.xml

Yes, I recommend to drop smplayer and smtube from PureOS.

so, do you suggest to drop them both from archive (its not like we don't have plenty of other apps for such use case) and improvement in security and freedom of archive might be enough big to simply remove them from pureos archive (we can always change that in future if it changes)

seems smplayer (authored by same upstream as smtube) is sloppy about executing external code: As an example, if youtube parsing fails then it offers to download updated javascript code for parsing - from insecure URL!

it seems the version of smtube currently in Debian does *not* rely on tonvid.com. A likely related issue to that is https://bugs.debian.org/797500

funny, I am the maintainer for mps-youtube and while it is cli based, it can show video as well (defaults to mpv for such usage)

possible alternatives to smtube are minitube and (for console only, and therefore quite likely limited to audio) mps-youtube

smtube is an interactive Youtube browser - that is different from smplayer/mpv/youtube-dl which only supports feeding an explicit already known Youtube URL.

for the record: mpv uses youtube-dl for accessing Youtube and other online streaming services,

Awesome, thanks! This is the best way to fix these bugs!

Fixed libsdl1.2 has entered Debian testing, so assume that means it is fixed in PureOS as well.

not PureOS related issue.

not PureOS related issue.

Againt not PureOS related at all and you basically create 3 bug reports that contained pretty much the same thing. If you ever report OS bug, please combine things into one bug report that are same/similar.

Not PureOS related.

Same as for T154.

Same as for the T154.

And unless this is upstreamed we will not do it, as we are low on manpower for having too much deltas. Also, AFAIK there is Wayland/GNOME solution being prepared for this kind of thing, so that is most probably what we will end up with.

@ark this is the tracker for PureOS related problems and suggestions, so for the software, not for the hardware. If you have any suggestions about hardware, you can write to feedback @puri.sm.

We are talking here about hardware right? So this doesn't fit PureOS at all as it is not OS related thing.

It should actually not show that prompt, but I haven't yet found a sane way to tell mkfs to override existing partitions without also having it ignore potential other issue that we do not want to ignore.

Humm, ok,well, it's not intuitive because it asks for confirmation *after* it already repartitioned the disc (and yes, even without reformatting it's bad), but I guess it can be closed since technically, it's OEM and it shouldn't be running on a machine which is not meant to be wiped.. but in that case, just drop the "hdd already has a partition, are you sure you want to delete?" prompt since it's useless.

I am not sure if this is actually a bug - as soon as you hit the OEM install button, the OEM script will wipe all disks without asking, to ensure they are in a pristine state and contain a filesystem.
I changed the preferences for where the OS gets installed a while back, so in case we find something where we think that it is an SSD, the disk will be preferred over HDDs on the same machine.