A lot has happened since the last monthly blog post. Python 3.14 is now in Alpine edge (which as usually involved rebuilding and fixing up a lot of packages, thanks to everybody who took part in this!). The amazing GNOME developers brought us GNOME 50 "Tokyo" and speaking of that city, OSC Tokyo 2026 Spring took place and we were represented by Rob at the event. He had a stand, handed out Japanese and English leaflets about postmarketOS as well as stickers and showed postmarketOS running on several devices. From his event report: "As always there were many interested members of the community coming to the table, many [had not] heard about postmarketOS, but also several (10-20%) mentioned, they had an older device, which they want to test on but have not done so."
Conference Announcement
While we have talked about lots of events that we attended before, we are very excited to announce that we are hosting our own little conference later this year!
When: 25th to 27th of September
Where: RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany (two rooms, not all buildings 😉)
The goal is to get people from postmarketOS and related communities like Alpine Linux together and to have talks, workshops, technical discussions, figure out how to advance the project and to simply see each other IRL. A lot still needs to be figured out, but we are announcing the date early so the people who want to attend can already mark it in their calendar. We will follow up with a call for participation, registration and a conference schedule and are extremely excited to bring this together. Thanks to RWTH Aachen for the opportunity and to Aelin, Achill and Pablo for organizing it so far!
Organizational
Following up on the power delegation and teams topic from the hackathon, the decision making power has been moved from the Core Team to the whole team (Core Contributors + Trusted Contributors), and decisions are now being made asynchronously between team meetings (so more people have the chance to vote, not only the people attending to the meetings). See the updated governance page and !50. Thanks Pablo and everybody who contributed to the discussions!
The PMCR 0009 about defining new requirements for the "main" device category has been merged. Thanks Oliver and everybody who contributed!
We now have a workflow of dealing with packages where the maintainer does not respond to merge requests. From the pmaports approval rules: "If there is no package maintainer or the package maintainer does not reply within 2 weeks from the time the MR was opened, then any 2 approvals are required. When you merge a MR with no maintainer response, open a issue with the issue template." Thanks, Achill!
Contributor Support Programme: February 2026
This month the CSP contributors took part in the postmarketOS post-FOSDEM hackathon, and some were also heavily involved in representing postmarketOS at FOSDEM. Otherwise, they also focused more on development again:
Stefan spent a lot of his development time working on tooling and reviews: pmbootstrap, mrhlpr, dint, deviceinfo schema, or pmaports, which is essential to keep the project working, and the friction and overhead of contributors small. He also put some work into maintenance and usability improvements for devices, like fixing a crash in Megapixels for the PinePhone, or working on the stericsson kernel. Finally, some small amount of time was also put into coordination and user-facing work, like helping to offboard some TCs, reviewing blog posts, or working on a reimbursement policy.
Clayton did a lot of work on support of other project members, with a considerable amount of hours going into review of other people's code. He also continued working on enabling future postmarketOS features, like working on plymouth integration and spending many hours on immutable-related work, like duranium images, adding subpartition support, and fixing bugs in mkinitfs.
Pablo focused on two main topics this month: preparations for potentially applying to a Horizon Europe grant that considers sovereign operating systems for smartphones in its scope, and continuing to move forward with hardware CI and associated documentation. Other than that, Pablo worked on some small but needed tasks, including accounting work, preparations to setup a legal entity, preparations for the name change, or meeting community members.
Development News
The Radxa Dragon Q6A which uses the generic qcom-qcs6490 device package was moved to the "community" device category (!8210). In the screenshot above it runs KDE Plasma 6. Thanks, Aelin!
As postmarketOS developer, it can be hard to keep up with changes in workflows and tooling, and understanding why these changes were made. Stefan had the idea to create a blog specifically for such developer-relevant changes and wrote the first blog post for it, about the basically unused pmbootstrap subcommands "lint" and "aportupgrade" being removed. Thanks for that and to przmk for implementing this new blog in our homepage! Find the new blog at /devel.
The second devel blog post by Aelin is about unmaintained devices being archived after v26.06: "[…] we are going to archive all unmaintained packages under the device folder in pmaports after the release of v26.06. This gives about 3 months of time for people potentially interested in maintaining one of the affected devices (like you reading this?) to add themselves as the maintainer."
pmbootstrap 3.10.0 was tagged by Stefan! He writes: "Highlights include the install command prompting for user password and "pmOS is already installed on this medium" much earlier so you don't have to babysit it, run0 support if sudo and doas aren't installed, and UEFI boot by default for QEMU. Other than that, lots of smaller bug fixes and enhancements as well as technical debt being cleaned up. Big thanks to all the new contributors who showed up to help out with this!"
mobile-config-firefox 5.2.0 has been released as well (and is now in postmarketOS edge and v25.12). The most exciting change is support for vertical tabs by Peter. Give it a try and let us know what you think (on fedi or in the MCF chat), we might make this the default in the future!
Artwork and Docs
A beautiful blossom wallpaper (in the picture, !75) has been added to the artwork repository: "Flower-like procedural-ish repetition of the logo, ending up in a semi-transparent sea of its [replicas]." Thanks, Violet/Multi!
How to register on our GitLab instance is now documented. Thanks, Bill!
The mobile-config-firefox documentation has been reworked and now lives at docs.postmarketos.org/mobile-config-firefox. Thanks, Oliver!
Misc
- Podcast #47 FOSDEM 2026 Special has been released, featuring lots of folks from postmarketOS and special guests Ariadne from Alpine, David L. from Sailfish OS and Peter from LINMOB.net. Another episode (recorded at the hackathon) will be released soon.
Powered by
The following people wrote patches that have been merged since the last monthly blog post. Thank you very much for improving postmarketOS!
Aelin, Clayton, Pablo, Aster, Stefan, Oliver, Achill, Bart, Peter, Luca, Antoine, Fauzan, Myryk, Ferass, bluebunny, Hugo P., Hugo B., Bill, Adam, Barnabás, methanal, Paul, Tulip, Vishwas, Polyfloyd, Ingo, Ermine, Zakariya, Damillora, Dang, Rob, Brady, Vladimir S., Sam, Wren, Richard Ac., Violet/Multi, Rudraksha, Duje, illy, Dzmitry, Daniel St., Jana, knuxify, Scott, Federico, Mighty, Raymond, Rakshit, tomaszduda23, icyllite, gnumdk, H3, przmk, Kszyś, hexaheximal, Biswapriyo, Justin, Jan P., Anri, Val, Eric, Yassine, Nettika, Michael, Yohan, kersnazzle, Joshua, Insane, Daniel Sa., User0, Alicja, Yureka, Sebastian F., Mat, Jarico
Furthermore we thank everybody who has been contributing to any of the numerous upstream projects we use (Alpine Linux, Linux kernel, Phosh, Plasma (Mobile), GNOME (Mobile), Sxmo, ModemManager, and so many more!). And of course everybody who has helped out in other ways, such as helping others to run postmarketOS (e.g. in chats or IRL), improving documentation in the wiki, doing infrastructure and organizational work, or donating to postmarketOS.
You are the people who make this possible!
Help wanted
We are planning to switch to plymouth for boot splashes instead of using our homegrown pbsplash tool, so we can use DRM instead of framebuffer, show the logs when pressing ESC or a volume key and more (#4120). If you are interested in contributing to this effort, we need somebody to implement the openrc side of this and in general lots of testing. See !7482 for details and consider getting in touch via in the postmarketos-devel Matrix/IRC channel.
Stefan is thinking out loud about making pmbootstrap subcommands more intuitive in #2745 and would like to hear your feedback.
If you are interested in improving docs.postmarketos.org, Bill is working on improvements for the announcement line and would like to have feedback and help with testing/coding in !63.
You can send us topics to include in the next blog post by commenting in: #228
If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.