As our community grows, we are increasing the focus we put on planning and organizing the work we do. Therefore we have been thinking hard about priorities for this year. And as we mentioned after our FOSDEM hackathon, the greatest goal for this year is reliability.
Reliability
So far, the postmarketOS community has mostly been focused on functionality: Hackers bring up devices and get them to a point where various device features such as audio, calls and Wi-Fi are usable once or most of the time. We want to get it to always.
Ongoing focus by the team
Currently the postmarketOS team is focusing on the following projects:
Getting a PCB ready to be able to place phones in a rack for testing. This is necessary so we have remote control of the devices for booting or flashing, and we avoid the risk of batteries in racks. There has been an amazing progress on the design in the last weeks, and a test run might be possible before v25.06. Thanks Federico, Anjan, Caleb, and ncorna!
Software work on CI-tron to be able to talk to devices and seamlessly connect them to our GitLab instance is underway upstream and in our repos. This allows treating real devices as any other runner in GitLab! We will share more information about this project, its architecture and reasons in a follow-up blog post. Thanks Martin Roukala, Samuel Dionne-Riel, and Pablo!
Finishing the integration of systemd, to bring its stability on-par with OpenRC (#3476). systemd brings considerable reliability improvements in the form of better management of services, logging, and more general predictability in the behavior of the lower-layers of the operating system. Though a lot of work is still needed, we are well on track to have systemd in v25.06!
systemd musl upstreaming efforts are slowly underway. musl is the C standard library used in Alpine Linux and postmarketOS. It provides us with a great set of benefits, but has some limitations and is not supported in systemd. For maintainability reasons, it's critical we have support upstream. Stefan will be taking over from Jane's efforts. She already did an amazing job of rebasing the patches we currently onto systemd 256.11, investigating failing tests from systemd's own testsuite running against musl and creating related tasks for upstreaming. If you want to help, please comment in one of the issues so we avoid double-work and coordination issues. Thanks Jane, Stefan, and Oliver!
An immutable version of postmarketOS is slowly taking shape as follow-up from systemd integration. There is now a PMCR, and NLnet will fund some work on this topic through the year. Again, if you want to get involved here as well please do reach out. Thanks Clayton and Aster!
Community support
As it can be seen in the monthly blog posts, it takes a village to make postmarketOS! The team can't do everything, but what we can do is support you in achieving specific features. So if you want to play a big role in advancing a critical feature in postmarketOS, we are happy to lend a hand with planning, mentoring, prioritizing code review, applying for grants or buying hardware. If you want to work on some of these areas, feel free to approach anybody in the team in the chat rooms or reaching out at: team <at> postmarketos.org
Prioritized tasks:
Audio (kernel/ALSA): audio issues are one of the main pain points anybody running Linux (Mobile) regularly experiences. Even though the situation has improved with Pipewire on desktop in the last years, the support for Mobile on the low-level layers of the stack has room for improvement. For example, call audio is not very reliable, several configurations (Bluetooth, speakers) are hard to test, and depend on too many variables to work. In addition, even most of our close-to-mainline kernels have non-upstreamable patches to make audio work at all. The same is also true for ALSA, the low-level user-space component (the equivalent to Mesa on graphics). We hope to be able to support the community on improving this situation and we are extremely grateful for everybody who has already been working on this in the past, getting to the current state was a great challenge for sure! A good starting point for audio related improvements is joining the postmarketos-audio channel.
Cameras: as a follow-up from the work done the last year, we hope to support the ecosystem to continue growing. The tasks are well set by Robert which eases the bar for contributing in #3235! Also see #98.
Android app compatibility: in recent times some really talented people have been working on more paths for getting Android apps running on proper Linux. In addition to Waydroid, the Android Translation Layer project took off, and work on Aliendalvik integration has moved forward as well. We welcome all those different approaches, and would be happy to provide support for more of that great work to happen!
Power usage and management: one of the most important missing features is having a mode for charging turned off phones, without fully booting into postmarketOS (#1224). But there are other issues as well. Solving any of these would greatly improve the experience of using postmarketOS.
Approaching less technical conferences, podcasts, and different communication channels. We are aware that our goals and mission align with big parts of society that are less technical, such as people interested in sustainability. If you would like to spread the word and are already a well known member of our community who follows our Code of Conduct then reach out and we can look into providing stickers and other merch, resources and lessons learned from other conferences, or e.g. point to what you are doing with our Mastodon account.
Lessons from 2024
Last year we did a similar plan internally. We managed to move many things forward, like systemd, mobile-config-firefox or VoLTE grants as well as the move to gitlab, coming up with a mission statement, etc. However, we saw room for improvement:
- We did not manage to communicate our goals as clearly to the community as we have attempted to do here, limiting the visibility and the options for others to help out.
- We probably had set too many priorities, so we limited them this year.
What would you like to see?
Is there anything that you find terribly important that we have missed here? Send us feedback via Mastodon, Lemmy or team <at> postmarketos.org.