So things started breaking shortly after I installed PureOS in a VirtualBox VM. I couldn't install vim for some reason. Strange error messages of the package not being available and the apt couldn't update. Weird stuff.

Well after trying a few different things it turns out the system time was off by 19 hours, which as it so happens, will break all sorts of things. On the command line you can set your date/time like this:

sudo date -s "05 JUL 2018 17:48:00"

I might have to mess around with the network time protocol deamon, ntpd, to get the system time correct. But for now date -s get's things working.