After 6 months of development, a new release of the project postmarketOS 26.06 has been presented, 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 65 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:
- Added support for Google Asurada Chromebook devices, Google Cherry Chromebook, Google Corsola Chromebook, Radxa Dragon Q6A, and PINE64 PineNote. Due to problems with maintenance or delivery of an outdated kernel, assemblies for ASUS MeMO Pad 7, Microsoft Surface RT, NVIDIA Tegra ARMv7, Samsung Chromebook, and Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro.
- The KDE Plasma Mobile shell has been updated to version 6.6.5. Environment Phosh, based on GNOME technologies and developed by Purism for the Librem 5 smartphone, has been updated to version 0.55. Some specific postmarketOS settings have been transferred to the Phosh Mobile Settings configurator, and the display manager has been switched to Phosh’s recommended login screen phrog and background process greetd.