It's February, and we are still sticking to our new year resolutions and greeting the month with a blog post update! Among other topics, this month has been crazy busy with infrastructure migrations (you might have noticed the performance and reliability improvements with the postmarketOS server!). And of course FOSDEM was a few days ago! We have stayed in Belgium and are half-way through a 3-day hackathon with most of the team. It is very exciting to be able to meet in person, and we are getting lots of work and long-term planning done. We have financed part of this through your donations, so they are already making an impact, thanks to everybody! We will make sure to write a summary blog post for FOSDEM and the Hackathon once it is all over!
Governance: more ways to become a Trusted Contributor
Through the last months, we have been working on improving the governance structure of the project. And this month we followed up by refining the process to become a Trusted Contributor. Now, you don't need to be a developer to become official part of the postmarketOS team! There are plenty of ways to contribute to the project that are not just with code. We want to encourage people to do so, and give them credit for what they do!
And seems like the Governance improvements are actually having an impact on the project. Since last update, we have welcomed two new Trusted Contributors: Ferass El Hafidi and Arnav Singh! They have both been doing great work around different parts of the project, and we are very happy to have them on-board! Maybe next month we can introduce our first non-developer of the team?
So what's new?
- After a short break, we released a new podcast episode, and recorded another at FOSDEM!
- We moved pmbootstrap back to gitlab.com.
- Work on generic Intel and AMD devices. There has been lots of work put to rework and improve the packaging and hardware support on first install. Thanks Clayton!
- The Pinebook Pro has a new maintainer! There was a call to move it out of community due to the lack of maintenance, and Quade Curry stepped up. Thanks a lot!
- Work on the new kernel config fragments implementation has continued. Thanks Jenneron, Clayton, and Arnav!
- We have 4 new supported devices: Samsung J6, OnePlus 9 Pro, Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 Wi-Fi, and Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite. Also, 2 other devices gained mainline support: OnePlus 9, Motorola Moto G 4G.
- Dozens of kernels were updated to the latest linux 6.7 release. We were able to demo some of them at FOSDEM, and got great feedback about the fact that all our devices are running the latest kernel. Thanks to all of our kernel contributors!
- Work on merging some of our low-level components into BuffyBox has started! Thanks cherrypicker!
- We merged some good improvements and generalization for exynos5420 devices. Thanks Grimler!
- mkinitfs and boot-deploy got some cleanups and improvements related to EFI booting and the deprecated osk-sdl. Thanks Caleb and Clayton!
- The Fairphone 5, the newest device we support, got some further improvements. Thanks Luca!
- Mate and LXQT got some small improvements. Thanks Jakko!
- btrfs installations do now get a much better default experience on first install. Thanks papiris!
- We got an artist design wallpapers specific for postmarketOS. They are not integrated yet, but we're working on it.
- We moved from self-hosting our email to Migadu. This was enabled by your donations, as we know that we can pay for it long- term, and frees up some of our time to do more exciting postmarketOS stuff!
- The Mastodon pmOS devices bot is up and running again. Make sure to follow it if you're interested in the new devices that keep coming. Thanks Raffaele!
- A new pmbootstrap release is out. It contains many fixes and improvements, including some relevant performance improvements during build, several envkernel changes, and much more. Thanks Ollie and all the contributors!
And what's next?
We of course have great dreams and big plans coming out of the hackathon. Short-term plans are not so ambitions, but still exciting!
- We hope to ship the new wallpapers soon.
- The work on the kconfig fragments will certainly continue!
- We will switch the latest GTK release, with new renders.
- We will stop supporting osk-sdl at a close point in time.
- We will improve the way we handle the recommended packages for GNOME and KDE, so there is a more similar experience in-between different UIs of the same desktop.
Conclusion
Last month's blog post seems to have been well received, so we hope to continue with this series! In general, this month there seems to have been a bit less throughput in terms of features, but not every month there's a member starting to work on the project full-time! Also, we have all been preparing for FOSDEM, and the output from FOSDEM and the hackathon will hopefully make a big impact. So we look forward to continue the work and keep you updated!
If you appreciate the work we're doing on postmarketOS, and want to support us, consider joining our OpenCollective.