After 6 months of development, presented the release of the project postmarketOS 25.12, developing a Linux distribution for mobile devices based on the Alpine Linux package base, the standard Musl C library and the BusyBox set of utilities. The goal of the project is to provide a Linux distribution for smartphones and tablets that does not depend on the support life cycle of official firmware and is not tied to the standard solutions of the main industry players. Builds are prepared for 62 devices, including PINE64 PinePhone Pro, Purism Librem 5, OnePlus 6, Fairphone 5, Google Nexus 10, Google Pixel 3a, Nokia N900, Lenovo A60xx, ASUS MeMo Pad 7, as well as various Samsung Galaxy and Xiaomi models. Limited experimental support is provided for more than 600 devices.
The postmarketOS environment is unified and places all device-specific components in a separate package. All other packages are identical for all devices and are based on packages from the Alpine Linux distribution. Assemblies use the vanilla Linux kernel whenever possible, and if this is not possible, then kernels from firmware prepared by device manufacturers. The main custom shells offered are KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh, GNOME Mobile and Sxmo, but it is possible to install other environments, including MATE, COSMIC and Xfce.
In the new release:
- Number ready-made assemblies increased from 57 to 62. Support for the Lenovo ThinkSmart View tablet was added.
- The core assembly for Qualcomm Snapdragon 410/412 (MSM8916) chips and all devices using it have been moved to the “testing” category: Arrow DragonBoard 410c, BQ Aquaris X5, Lenovo A6000, Lenovo A6010, Motorola Moto G4 Play, Samsung Galaxy A3, Samsung Galaxy A5, Samsung Galaxy E7, Samsung Galaxy Grand Max, Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Value Edition, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7, Wileyfox Swift, Xiaomi Mi Note 2, Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro, Xiaomi Redmi 2.
- The KDE Plasma Mobile shell has been updated to version 6.5.3 (previously version 6.3.5 was shipped). Compared to the previous release, the ability to launch Android applications using the Waydroid toolkit has been improved, loading of the system lock screen has been accelerated, and the Folio home screen has been modernized. To work with the camera, instead of GNOME Snapshot, the application Plasma Camera 2.1.0 is used, and instead of the on-screen keyboard, maliit
the package used is plasma-keyboard, based on the code for the on-screen keyboard Qt Virtual Keyboard, included in Qt.
