Booting has been made more appealing by the new splash screen, which is shown above. It changes the splash by adding the three segments of the logo fading in and out, but comes with some underlying functional improvements as well. As we switched from pbsplash to Plymouth, it is now possible to press ESC (or power on phones) to get the boot log and we can finally rotate the splash screen on devices where it looks wrong otherwise. Implementing this was great teamwork by Clayton, Aster, Brady, Rob, Ferass, Hakşiye, Mirthe, bluebunny and Sicelo in !7482!
In other news, ModemManager was upgraded to 1.25.95_git20260422 in edge by Achill: "Stable release will be soon (expected in a few weeks) and has been very stable for most users, while bringing new features like cell broadcast that we can start to test in Alpine edge." As always, we are very grateful for the hard work of ModemManager maintainers (Aleksander et al.), and specifically Guido from Phosh for implementing cell broadcast.
Organizational
We will be financing work to upstream q6voice(d) to mainline Linux, see the previous blog post for details.
The timeline for the upcoming v26.06 release has been published (now at docs.postmarketos.org, the previous wiki page for creating releases has been split up, reworked and moved to dpo / issue templates as it made more sense: !8486).
We have approved changes to our reimbursement policy which allow community members to request reimbursement of items they use for the development of the project (!46). In order to put it into action, we have approved an additional budget entry of 500€ to cover some of those expenses (!23). If what you are doing fits the policy, please feel free to make use of it!
Following up on the power delegation topic from the Hackathon, the responsibility over selecting finance team members was moved from only Core Contributors to the Assembly (Core Contributors and Trusted Contributors).
device-microsoft-surface-rtanddevice-nvidia-tegra-armv7(both usinglinux-postmarketos-grate) were moved from the community category to testing as they didn't meet requirements for community anymore. Since then Rob has stepped up to maintain the tegra-armv7. There were also several other maintainer changes in pmaports. Thanks to everybody who has maintained packages previously and to the people who have stepped up to fill in the roles!Aster has joined the social media team.
Contributor Support Programme
As announced earlier, our strategy for the Contributor Support Programme so far has been that we use the extra income from donations (that we didn't put into a budget) for the CSP. However the first months of the year our income has behaved pretty close to our predictions, which means we need to pause the CSP during Quarter 2 of 2026. We will use this next quarter to do a retrospective on the process and probably rework how we fund the CSP to keep it going more easily. Even though we need to pause the CSP, we consider it a very successful experiment given how much important development and organizational work got done through it. Thanks to everybody who has been donating to postmarketOS, you made this possible!
March 2026
This month the CSP contributors continue working intensively across the project. While there were a lot of technical improvements, the contributors also spent quite some time on governance, fundraising, and admin tasks:
Stefan spent a majority of his time working on our tooling (pmbootstrap and dint). However, he also contributed heavily to admin work by helping with the application to a European Commission grant, moving forward with bureaucratic tasks in relation to the floss.fund grant we are set to receive, and working in relation to trademarking our new name. Finally, he also contributed to multiple devices: PinePhone, PineTab 2, Zinwa Q25; and to communication, helping get the development blog started.
Clayton continued his focused work on Duranium and supporting the team with reviews across postmarketOS projects. As part of that work, he also contributed to a lot of other projects, like plymouth, unl0kr, or systemd integration, and wrote a very detailed Duranium blog post to explain the benefits and rationale of the project. Finally, he also spent some hours doing infra work for the benefit to the whole of the postmarketOS community.
Pablo put a lot more work than expected this month, mainly focusing on fundraising, governance, and enabling other members of the project. He spent nearly half of his time working on applying to the aforementioned European Commission grant. Other than that, he moved multiple governance decisions forward, like removing power from CCs and establishing how to make decisions by the whole team. Finally, he also worked on documentation, a bit on Hardware-CI and on communication around finance matters.
April 2026
As this monthly blog post is coming out a bit later than usual, we are including CSP reports of two months. During April the team members focused more on technical work than during previous months:
Stefan spent again a lot of time doing pmbootstrap maintenance, review, and helping others get started. However, he also spent some time doing necessary upstream tasks, like contributing to GTK debugging, flatpak packaging or Phosh Mobile Settings. He also did a bit of CI and governance work.
Clayton continued developing duranium and doing bug squashing all across the project and upstream: in our CI, mkinitfs, flatpak, QEMU, podman, or systemd. He also put focus again on Plymouth, having mostly finished the integration into pmaports to replace pbsplash. Finally, he also supported and reviewed the draft of the legal entity bylaws.
Pablo spent quite some time on finance and accounting, managing paid projects, doing trademark work, and finishing the postmarketOS part of the application in the mentioned European Commission grant. He also pivoted a bit to development again, working on HW-CI and working on creating a future legal entity.
Duranium
A lot of improvements to the optionally immutable variant of postmarketOS were done by Clayton:
The immutable version of postmarketOS now supports system extensions (sysext, !11) that you can optionally install on top of your immutable images. The main use case for this is having a developer tools sysext, which is now implemented as well.
Configuration extensions (confext) are now used for managing
/etc(!17).A major refactor of how images are configured and constructed for Duranium has been made (!15).
CI now "snapshots" relevant packages from binary repos when building images, so they are all built from the same set of packages/versions (!14).
A OP6/6T bootloader bug has been found and worked around: "the bootloader appears to be scanning the GPT, and if a partition has a name that is > 24 char in length, it's impossible to enter fastboot. 25ch is way below the GPT spec limit. It can be recovered by clearing the userdata partition. I'll work on a fix in duranium to use shorter partition names. Fun times 🥳"
While it will not be in the v26.06 release yet, Duranium is moving fast and you can take part in development and discussions around it by joining the immutable chat. Furthermore we now have public sync meetings on every third Tuesday of the month. The point of these meetings is to have a regular onboarding meeting for team members and the general community to discuss Duranium design, issues, and ask questions. One outcome of a previous meeting was the suggestion to integrate duranium.postmarketos.org into postmarketos.org/install (#229).
Artwork and Homepage
foobtech has created their first wallpaper contribution in !78, thank you!
Homepage CSS files now have hashes in their file names (!505): " After a CSS change is deployed, a casual visitor might still have the old version in cache, rendering broken results. Include the hash of CSS files in their filename, such that new versions have different URLs and are never read from any cache." Thanks Hugo B.!
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, Aster, Stefan, Pablo, Luca, Oliver, Antoine, bluebunny, Myryk, Bart, Achill, Adam, Ferass, Barnabás, Eisenbahnfan, Lynxis, Andreas, Rob, Sicelo, Paul, Affe, Neil, Pan, Dang, Arnav, Duje, Peter, Mighty, ΞЖKƆ/QVH, Nikita, dabao1955, Hugo P., Steven, Scott, Hannibal-Woollen, Kevin, Hugo B., Rudraksha, Anton, Alexander M., Linus, Alicja, Robert M., foobtech, Ali, André, Guido, Gregor, Wren, Sam, Chris V., Eric, Fauzan, Petr, methanal, setotau, Bill, Henrik, binarycraft007, knuxify, vognev, Kidd, Vishwas, Jakko, QuickSwift315490, Dylan, Frieder, Max H., Casey
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!
Upcoming events
2026-05-27 to 28: Embedded Recipes 2026 (Nice, FR)
2026-08-15 to 17: FrOSCon 2026 (Sankt Augustin, DE)
2026-09-25 to 27: postmarketOS conference (Aachen, DE) — yes, our very own conference ☺️ registrations are now open, as well as the call for proposals!
Help wanted
After years of doing a great job with LinuxPhoneApps.org, Peter is looking for people who are interested in continuing his efforts. His farewell blog post is well worth reading. Thank you so much for maintaining the site for such a long time!
Consider signing up for the testing team to join the testing fun for v26.06 before it is officially released!
If you haven't already, you might want to check if you are using one of the unmaintained devices that would be archived after v26.06 is released, and possibly fill in as maintainer for it. See #4445 and the related devel post for details.
You can send us topics to include in the next blog post by commenting in: #230
If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.