Since our last blog post, we have been at a couple of events again: Federico represented us in Palermo, Italy on the 25th of October, doing a talk and sharing a stand with Marco from the Mobian community (event report). On the same day Rob had a postmarketOS stand at Open Source Conference 2025 Tokyo/Fall in Japan (event report). If you are in the area, Rob was invited to do an upcoming presentation at TLUG. Jozef posted a photo from the Linux Mobile stand at OpenAlt in Brno, Czech Republic taking place on November 1 and 2, with some devices running postmarketOS and other alternative cool operating systems from the Linux Mobile ecosystem. Last weekend SeaGL took place in Seattle, US with Clayton, Arnav and Paul at the postmarketOS table, among other things playing with immutable postmarketOS on the new BlackBerry KEY 2 port. Thanks to everybody who went to those events, and to Free Circle G/LUG from Palermo and all other event organizers!
Luca on the other hand stayed at home with his cat to bring up the Fairphone 4 cameras in one week, and Fairphone 3 cameras the week after from a night train: "As of tonight the Fairphone 3 cameras (front and rear) are working on postmarketOS with mainline Linux! And if you saw, only last week I got the Fairphone 4 cameras to work. A bright future is ahead for mobile Linux! 📸"
Organizational
Applying for FLOSS/fund was well worth it: "We are pleased to inform you that postmarketOS is being awarded 25000 USD by FLOSS/fund to support its continued development. We deeply appreciate the work you do and its impact, and are happy to be a small part of something that all of us derive immense value from. You can read more about our second tranche, learnings from this year, and future plans on our anniversary blog post." We are currently working out how the funds are going to be transferred into our Open Collective. Thank you very much FLOSS/fund, we will put this to good use to drive postmarketOS and Linux on Mobile development forward!
Another source of income that we can turn into accelerating postmarketOS development is our partnership with the small US-based second-hand device distributor SenderoLinux. They are a donor and supporter of postmarketOS for a long time and have just increased their monthly donation. We are happy to announce that if you are looking for a development device and you are living in the US, you now have the option to buy a OnePlus 6T with postmarketOS pre-installed!
Earlier this year we were looking for somebody to add 32-bit support to QBE, which will in turn allow Sxmo to drop legacy code. We are excited to announce that Norayr is now being funded by NLnet and NGI Zero Core to do this project. Thanks to NLnet, Norayr and to Quentin, Willow, Drew, Oliver for organizing this!
The members of the Code of Conduct team have changed: Pablo and Clayton joined and Luca and Bart left (!21). The current members are listed on the Code of Conduct page.
Documentation Index
We are very excited to announce what we have been working on in the last couple of weeks: a central place for documentation for postmarketOS and the various projects within it.
Previously, documentation was spread over many different places such as our website, the wiki and the various repositories of projects. This made it both hard to locate documentation when looking for it and it wasn't always clear which parts of documentation were authoritative and which ones weren't.
So, what can you expect to find there? User-contributed advice and knowledge will remain in the wiki. Documentation for governance, policies and processes is now on the new website. You can also find the documentation for projects under the postmarketOS umbrella there, such as pmbootstrap or BPO, our build queue manager. Amongst other things, we've also started to add packaging documentation to pmaports and documented how to contribute to the new docs.postmarketos.org repository itself.
While we've already moved a couple of things over to the new documentation, there's still a lot left to move, write and improve. Not all of our processes are formalized and the website itself could use some more love to e.g. improve the navigation.
We've labeled a couple of issues that should be good starting points for people willing to help out and contribute. If you like writing documentation or know your way around HTML/CSS, we'd love your help!
Go check it out at https://docs.postmarketos.org/!
This wouldn't have been possible without countless hours spent by people writing, designing and iterating on multiple versions of the documentation (!10, !12, !131, !132, !13, !14, !15, !16, !17, !18, !19, !1, !20, !23, !25, !2711, !2712, !2713, !2714, !2716, !2717, !2721, !2, !3, !4, !5, !7104, !7, !87, !88, !89, !8, !90, !91, !9). Thanks, Jens, Oliver, Pablo, Ranny!
Sxmo 1.18.0
Sxmo 1.18.0 has been released, with a bunch of improvements and new features! The most significant change is the support for two new WMs: i3 and river. This release also drops support for callaudiod which used to be the way to switch to "Phone call" audio mode, as it was replaced by proper handling in wireplumber (see also our blog post on wireplumber and callaudiod).
Another major new feature is a new Quick Actions menu shown in the screenshot.
"Thanks to the whole community for your work, and for the mutual support that is our characteristic."
Full announcement: Sxmo 1.18.0 released
Night Light Mainline Driver
The night light feature makes looking at the bright AMOLED displays at night much more pleasant (demo).
A driver has been written to enable night light on recent Qualcomm based devices (MSM8998 and later). This includes not only phones, but also tablets and laptops as they all use the same hardware block (DPU). The driver has been submitted upstream.
Federico wrote a blog post, describing his first time writing a mainline driver "[...] is something I've been hesitant to do, as I perceived the task as the most difficult in the Linux Mobile development; [...] I've decided to try fixing the problem, even if I was not sure of the result.": Night Light: My first mainline driver
Thanks, Federico!
Mobile Config Firefox
about:mobile page where users can manually toggle the options that are set by MCF.A long requested feature has been for example, to be able to control whether the address bar is on the bottom or on top. This is now possible, as Danny showed in this video (the screenshot is from there).
Furthermore this is the groundwork needed to add custom UI elements, e.g. for better tab navigation that would move the button for showing open tabs into the address bar and remove the extra tab bar on top of the address bar. In theory we can do this now in a way that it is very unlikely to break with new Firefox versions.
Peter on the other hand has been improving the popups handling inside the user interface for opening the Firefox menu, adding bookmarks, etc, to make them work more reliably. He writes in !84: "This changes popup handling based on the work by FuriLabs for the FLX1. Jesús Higueras did the hard work for this. To credit them, I've cherry-picked and re-formatted multiple commits from https://github.com/FuriLabs/furios-firefox-tweaks."
All this is currently in mobile-config-firefox.git, not yet in the latest release. As these are significant changes, we might have regressions and would like to have feedback from users and packagers for the various distros using our config first. You can try it out by following the manual install instructions.
If you are interested in hacking on this config or have feedback, then feel free to create merge requests again / reach out in the issues or in the #mobile-config-firefox channel (Matrix and IRC (OFTC)).
Thanks, Danny, Peter, Oliver and Jesús from FuriLabs!
pmbootstrap
Following kconfigcheck improvements from last month, there have been several follow-up fixes and improvements now that the features are being tested more broadly ( !2698, !2702, !2697, !2715), Thanks Clayton, Luca!
With the goal to eventually getting rid of the downstream GCC cross-compilers, and allow people to make use of features like ThinLTO and CFI in the kernel, LLVM support has been merged into pmbootstrap. The
envkernelutility now supports an--llvmflag similar to--gcc6, and if a kernel has clang within its dependencies, pmbootstrap kconfig will update the config accordingly (!2705, !2689). Thanks Jens!Support for building systemd images for devices with specific keyboard configurations has now been merged. This allows to build systemd images for devices like the Nokia N900, or the BlackBerry KEY2 (!2708). Thanks Paul!
Support for booting PowerPC Virtual Machines in QEMU by using the standard procedure through OpenFirmware has been added (!2704). Thanks, Jens!
Various small fixes and improvements (!2699, !2700, !2701, !2706, !2709, !2710, !2718, !2719, !2720). Thanks Stefan, Biswapriyo, RoadRoller01!
New device ports
This time the following devices have been ported:
Lenovo TAB 2 A8-50F (!7215): a Lenovo Tablet from 2015, showed booting to XFCE. It is incredible to see that the community can give a second life to a new device even 10 years after its release. Thanks, Oreeeee!
WD MyCloud Gen2 (!7259): being a NAS system by drive manufacturer Western Digital, this is one of those devices that we would have originally never thought of, but that show the incredible power of postmarketOS. Thanks, ΞЖKƆ/QVH!
Generic MSM8226 (!7279): an experimental port to boot together devices like all the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 fality, or the original Motorola Moto G. Thanks, Raymond!
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 (!7211) has now gained support for a close-to-mainline kernel, bringing in more features and reduced maintenance in the future. Thanks Eisenbahnfan!
Generic loongarch64 and QEMU loongarch64 devices are now available to test on real hardware and virtual machines (!7116). Thanks Jens!
Amazon Echo Show 5 1st Generation is now supported in postmarketOS with a downstream kernel (!7195, !7203). Thanks, User0!
Kernel packaging
Multiple kernel config options have been added or updated, including making it possible to have many of them as modules, now that the tristate option is allowed (!7136, !6263, !7002). Thanks Clayton, Adam!
The status of Bluetooth communication for devices using the Qualcomm SM8150 chipset, which includes devices like the Xiaomi Pad 5 or OnePlus 7 Pro, has been greatly improved (!7113). Thanks May!
The kernel for Qualcomm SDM660 devices got many updates, including audio support for Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 and Xiaomi Redmi Note 7, sensor support enablement, improvements to modem firmware, touchscreens, panels and much more (!7180). Thanks Alexey M. and the whole sdm660 kernel community!
Several kernels were updated to compile with LLVM (!7161, !7167, !7165, !7173, !7176, !7193, !7191, !7189, !7172). Thanks Jens, Rob!
Many kernels were upgraded to newer releases. At the same time, multiple people responded to last month's call-for-help and took over maintenance and upgraded kernels for community devices that had been long without an upgrade. Huge thanks to everybody that contributed to that effort! (!7133, !7152, !7106, !7177, !7207, !7218, !7180, !7238, !7224, !7225, !7187, !7253, !7255, !6867, !7226, !7260, !7100, !7107). Thanks Clayton, Eric, User0, Sebastian F., Arnav, Jianhua, Ingo, dabao1955, Jack, Henrik, Adam, Alexey M., Stefan, Luca, Augis154!
Various kernels received config changes or other tiny fixups (!7256, !7274, !7139, !7150). Thanks Biswapriyo, Kamal, Sebastian F., Casey!
Booting up
It is now possible to reboot and shut down devices from the initramfs shell (!7128). Thanks, Clayton!
boot-deploy can now properly generate GRUB configs for devices with PowerPC PReP boot partitions and no separate boot partition (!92). Thanks, Jens!
Fixed a bug where two clicks were required to toggle the password in the FDE unlocker when "obscured" is set to "false" in
unl0kr.conf(!68). Thanks, Vladimir!A couple of further miscellaneous fixes and improvements to the FDE unlocker and the initramfs (!7201, !63, !70). Thanks, Clayton, Vladimir!
systemd
systemd has been upgrade to 257.10 (!7230, !13). Thanks Jane!
The way pbsplash, the application that shows the nice postmarketOS logo on boot, is started and stopped under systemd has been extensively reworked. This makes it more reliable, and allows to improve usage of some systemd features like the emergency shell (!6926, !7202) Thanks Jane, Clayton!
The black screen on regular Plasma installations before logging in has been fixed, it no longer needed to type the login password blindly (!7170). Thanks Bart!
Several upgrades to systemd-enabled packages (!7143, !7164, !7184, !7205, !7236, !7233, !7242, !7263, !7267). Thanks Bart, Clayton, Oliver, Achill, Robert M.!
Various smaller systemd related improvements and fixes (!7234, !7266, !7063, !7141). Thanks Vasiliy, Achill, Bart, sicelo!
pmaports
The COSMIC desktop environment is closer to working out-of-the-box with OpenRC as the init system (!7156). Thanks, Aster!
Fixed an issue that caused
openrc -Uto think that the system was not started by openrc and refuse to start user services (!7197). Thanks, Aster!If fwupd and systemd-boot are both installed, fwupd-efi now gets installed automatically as well to make UEFI capsule updates work (!7244). Thanks, Pablo!
It is now possible to configure the ZRAM swap compression algorithm via a deviceinfo variable. It previously always used zstd, which may not be a good fit for some very old or low-power devices with weak CPUs (!7239). Thanks, sicelo!
Plasma Mobile images now include feedbackd instead of hfd-service, which is used by Plasma 6.5 and newer (!7268). Thanks, Devin!
The os-installer UI package now supports os-installer 0.5.x and uses a shallow clone of pmaports, which should make installing faster (!7206, !7109). Thanks, Clayton!
- The ppc64le QEMU device can now be booted with Open Firmware instead of direct kernel boot (!7153). Thanks, Jens!
The Generic SM7150 device package now supports the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 / Mi CC9 Pro again (!7198). Thanks, Alexander Bantyev!
The Google Nexus 10 now has audio support (!7222). Thanks, Alexandre Marquet!
WiFi on microsoft-surface-rt has been fixed after it was broken in edge and v25.06 due to kernel changes upstream (!7186). Thanks, Arnav!
The Samsung Galaxy Core Prime LTE and Samsung Galaxy Grand Max now include a workaround that allows ModemManager to unlock SIM cards correctly (!7247, !7248). Thanks, Raymond!
We are very glad that the Google Gru and Veyron Chromebook device packages were adopted by new maintainers after our call for maintainers in the last blog post (!7258, !7269). Thanks, Eric, Sebastian F.!
Tuning files for the IMX838 and S5KJN1 camera sensors found in the Fairphone 5 were added to our libcamera package, making the colors less washed out, especially for the front camera (!7241). Thanks, Robert M.!
The SC7280 SoC package now depends on the common Qualcomm SoC package and 81voltd, which is useful for VoLTE/VoNR in the future and increases the chance of a working GPS with A-GPS and a quick location fix (!7044, !7254). Thanks, Markus!
Fixed the accelerometer reporting rotated values on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 so auto-rotation works as expected (!7085). Thanks, Martin J.!
It is now possible to install postmarketOS on Apple M-series Macs with the os-installer UI (!7112). Thanks, Clayton!
The BQ Aquaris M5 (bq-piccolo) port is now archived, users should use the generic MSM8916 port instead (!7174). Thanks, André!
Booting on the Samsung A5Y17LTE has been fixed by enforcing the creation of the
modules.orderfile (!7162). Thanks, small!The Samsung Galaxy S7 now boots again after disabling the camera in the kernel config and packaging all necessary firmware files (!7108). Thanks, Leah!
Workarounds for a buggy framebuffer and too large boot partition were added to the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2016 (!7243). Thanks, Stefan!
The downstream Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 port was archived in favor of the mainline port (!7280). Thanks, Raymond!
- Various fixes, improvements and other changes (!6221, !7140, !7142, !7145, !7147, !7148, !7149. !7151, !7154, !7160, !7163, !7175, !7182, !7183, !7188, !7190, !7192, !7194, !7200, !7204, !7214, !7217, !7220, !7221, !7231, !7232, !7249, !7250, !7251, !7252, !7261, !7262, !7289) Thanks, Ingo, Jens, Arnav, Eisenbahnfan, Aster, Stefan, Barnabás, Clayton, devixluvic, knuxify, coca, Rob, Oliver, Pablo, andrey, Raymond!
Misc
Plasma Mobile 6.5 has been released (and made it into postmarketOS edge) with improvements for Waydroid integration, the lockscreen, homescreen, settings and much more. See the release notes for more information.
There are now some very cute pictograms that showcase how to install immutable postmarketOS via pictures (!71). Thanks magdesign!
Tauchgang, the initiative to bring stable U-Boot releases for a variety of Linux Mobile devices has seen some improvements on its documentation. The requiremest for inclusion are now clearer, and how to add devices to the CI for automatic generation of the artifacts is now also documented (!3). Thanks, Ferass!
dint, the small utility created by Stefan to lint the deviceinfo files has seen improvements in features and correctness. A new variable to deal with PowerPC boot (!12), and improvements to CI (!14) and the correctness (!13) of the parser. Thanks Jens, Stefan!
Other improvements and fixes across various projects (!19, !1, !433, !435, !436, !438, !5, !85, !86). Thanks, Alexander Baransky, Clayton, Dylan, Rob, Stefan, Oliver, Pablo!
And what's next?
We are migrating to LLVM for kernel builds where feasible. If you maintain a kernel in pmaports, make sure to read the edge post.
We started planning for the upcoming v25.12 stable release, which will be based on Alpine Linux 3.23. You can check out the timeline here.
Dylan has been working on better integration of extensive USB features in postmarketOS. Those changes are expected to bring a more stable experience to USB connection between devices, and a bunch of new features like having MTP enabled by default, easying the process of copying files between devices. This work integrates previous daemons developed by other projects, like usb-moded from SailfishOS. This shows, once more, the power of the Linux on Mobile community as a whole! The merge request is up (!6531) and waiting for more testing (which of course you can take part in, if you want!).
Following the agreement with SenderoLinux presented above, we are looking into changes to increase the reach of postmarketOS and bring the project to the attention of more distributors willing to collaborate with us. You can expect more information related to that to be added to our website, and some write ups on our wishes and expectations working with distributors to be clarified and standardized in the future.
The FOSS on Mobile devroom at FOSDEM is once again taking place in 2026! If you have been active in our ecosystem, we want to hear from you. Have a look at the topic proposals and Call for Participation.
Help wanted
You can send us topics to include in the next blog post by commenting in #215. If you would like to help out with writing, join the
bloggingchat!If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.