It's mid-March, and here comes a new update on what has happened in postmarketOS for the last month! For the Core Team, this month has been characterized for the classic post-FOSDEM hangover: a mix between a huge amount of excitement, and the realization that real life exists, and not every weekend there's FOSDEM. As you hopefully all know, part of that excitement has been the final touches for making systemd changes public. If you have not read the systemd announcement yet, please make sure to do so. But in short, systemd gets added for Plasma and GNOME based UIs and will be the default there in pre-built images, and we put in a lot of work to make sure that Sxmo can still use OpenRC and it is even possible to build your own Plasma and GNOME based images with OpenRC if you prefer. However, it's also been an exciting month for other reasons. Since we started writing the last post, there has been more than 150 MRs merged in the postmarketOS namespace, and this seems to be a consistent upwards trend!
Scaling up: thoughts and improvements
The last month has been incredibly busy for the Core Team and the Trusted Contributors. It has been most likely the month with the most MRs opened and merged in a while if not ever. This means increased work for everybody, while the rest of the ecosystem continues moving forward, as for example with the KDE Plasma 6 release! Reviewing all these MRs is not an easy task, and sometimes the list of pending MRs and opened issues grows, and we can take a bit to get to your contributions. This would have been much harder without the Trusted Contributors program, but we certainly have room for improvement. If you have ideas of things that we could be doing better, or how to improve our technical and social processes, do not hesitate to reach out in chat or at mastodon.
Looking for Plasma maintainers
The upgrade to Plasma 6 has been a huge amount of effort, and Bart more or less completely did it by himself. If you are a happy Plasma user in postmarketOS or Alpine and would not only like to see it become better, but actively take part in that, then consider becoming a Plasma maintainer in Alpine/postmarketOS! You can reach out to us via IRC and matrix in the postmarketos-devel channel, and tag @PureTryOut. Maintainers don't need to be able to do everything, every small bit of work that could be taken from the current only maintainer would already be a huge help.
So what's new?
- We have 10 new device ports: Google Asurada, Corsola, and Cherry Chromebooks; Samsung Galaxy J5 (2017), J7 Pro, and A32 4G; Xiaomi Mi 9T / Redmi K20 and Redmi 12 and Note 9; and Clockwork Tech ClockworkPi uConsole CM4. This has been a very successful month in terms of device ports, thanks to all our contributors!
- Robert Eckelmann became a Trusted Contributor! He is the first non-developer to join, and comes with great ideas and contributions. Welcome to the team!
- We added more options for community devices, so there is better support for peripherals and other features. Thanks Luca!
- We extended our custom recommends logic, and now use it GNOME and KDE Plasma UIs. This warranties a more consistent experience through different UI. Thanks Clayton and Bart! (This was already shipped as part of the pmbootstrap 2.2.x releases, but not explicitly mentioned in the 2024-02 update blog post.)
- Finally drop osk-sdl as advertised. Thanks Clayton and David!
- Remove unused screen deviceinfo variables from the template. Thanks Andras!
- Started work on using zstd-compressed firmware for some kernels (#39). Lots of people from the team worked together on this, as well as with Alpine in order to reduce the size of shipped firmware. Thanks Newbyte, Clayton, f_, and Arnav!
- Multiple kernels were updated to the newest LTS version (6.6), and others continued to be updated to the latest stable release, 6.7. Thanks a lot to all our kernel maintainers!
- Continue the work on wallpapers, with some fixes to the N900 and more new artwork available. Thanks Sicelo and dikasp!
- Port msm8916 devices to use extlinux. Thanks Nikita!
- Start integrating Mypy into CI of multiple of our tools, and bump pmbootstrap's minimum required Python version to 3.9 (!2265). Thanks Newbyte and Pablo!
- Install non-free firmware by default, see the related edge blog post for reasoning. In the process, also add more firmware in generic x86_64 packages. Thanks Clayton!
- Start offering to build images for a few testing devices under some conditions. In consequence, devices don't need to be moved to community to get pre-built images. Thanks Oliver!
- All remaining infrastructure has been moved from the old and less reliable server to the new server, and the subscription for the old server has been canceled (so we don't need to pay for it anymore). Thanks Luca!
And what's next?
- GNOME 46 coming to alpine in some weeks.
- Continue our path towards systemd integration with KDE Plasma and GNOME.
- We plan to do some changes to the devices categorization, to help device maintainers, and ensure consistent quality among devices of the same category.
- More workforce will be available to join the team. Stay posted!
Conclusion
We are very happy with what we got done this month together, and that the systemd news were mostly received positively. There even was a poll on Mastodon with 539 people, of which 72% voted for systemd. We hope to keep bringing great news, while serving our community and collaborating closely with other projects.
If you appreciate the work we're doing on postmarketOS, and want to support us, consider joining our OpenCollective.