This June Plasma 6.7 was released and found its way into Alpine Linux and postmarketOS thanks to Bart who maintains KDE in both distros. Find out all about it in the official release announcement post! The post here covers some more highlights of what happened in postmarketOS since we made the last monthly blog post — besides Alpen Avocado of course.
Talks
postmarketOS, freeing yourself from big tech with a proper Linux distribution doing it 'the right way' by Bart at NLUUG (Netherlands Unix Users Group)
A Distributed Phone CI for postmarketOS by Pablo at Embedded Recipes
Organizational
Alpine Linux has joined our conference, making it officially The postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference! This made sense since we are working together closely with Alpine folks on a lot of topics already, and so we get to meet each other in real life at this shared conference. They have graciously offered to cover snacks and lunch for all attendees. The Call for Proposals has been extended until 2026-07-31.
Several people in our community and from other projects were interested in the phone harness (PDU) we created for our hardware CI. Pablo has created a process for requesting the phone harness.
bluebunny and Lukas are now Trusted Contributors in postmarketOS!
Ferass and Stefan have joined the Code of Conduct team. We have also added documentation for community spaces after receiving feedback that it wasn't obvious where the CoC applies.
As reported before on this blog, we are working on creating a legal entity for postmarketOS. We have now contracted the non-profit European Activism Incubator to move forward with that and will follow up with more details after the summer. Thanks Pablo, Antoine, Rob!
usb-signaller
Dylan's usb-signaller has been merged to postmarketOS edge! He wrote in !8553:
Some time ago,
usb-modedwas introduced to improve the handling of USB gadgets in postmarketOS,usb-modedwas picked due to its long track record of being around as the daemon for this purpose. However, its main focus is Android libhybris devices and includes a bunch of quirks to handle those. Mainline support was added a while ago when the PinePhone was introduced.However,
usb-modedis kinda complex and caused issues with mainline devices which have broken drivers as reported in #4306. Moreover, it cannot handle USB role switching (host <-> device) as one of the features asked in #4407 and #4071.After long consideration and looking for solutions in usb-moded, I rewrote it from scratch in Rust with as little code as possible and called it
usb-signaller. It currently handles the following features:
- Support gadget initialization, do not rely on initramfs or scripts to configure the gadget before running the daemon.
- Transactional switching between modes and gadgets for increased stability and reliability.
- Clear logging
- Handle missing kernel drivers such as chargers, including false prompts.
- Should not depend on a specific node like usb-moded does (
/sys/class/power_supply/usb)- OpenRC support […]
The initial MR also mentions currently missing features USB role switching (which has already been implemented in v0.3.0 in the meantime!) and detecting the cable status (#4).
Huge thanks to Dylan and everybody who has helped with testing!
Duranium
Waydroid can now be used with duranium via sysext (
updatectl enable waydroid, #4492). Thanks, Clayton!For systems with EFI variable support, Duranium is now using systemd/bootctl to keep a fallback bootloader around when updating, that can automatically be booted into if the updated bootloader is broken. This was done as part of the Duranium proof-of-concept work funded by NLNet and NGI Zero Core. Thanks, Clayton!
pmaports
linux-postmarketos-qcom-sdm845 has been updated to 7.1 in !8446. Among others, the LG G7 ThinQ has a working touch screen now and had lots of other improvements mainlined via the devicetree. Thanks to Joel, Paul and everybody else who contributed to this upgrade and tested it!
As previously announced, we have now moved unmaintained packages to the "archived" category !8883. We have also improved the workflow for merge requests without response from maintainers to avoid getting into such a situation in the future (!7770). Thanks Aelin, Achill!
The minimum kernel version requirements for the "testing" device category is now the oldest supported LTS on kernel.org and they must be built with LLVM (!8546). Thanks Aster!
We have dropped armhf (armv6) from postmarketOS edge (it never was in a release) as it realistically wasn't used by anybody in our community and spares us a lot of maintenance effort that we can put into improving other parts of postmarketOS (#4615). Thanks Ferass, Aelin, Oliver!
The pmaports documentation has more structure now and rules for merge requests to stable are now documented (!8812). Thanks Oliver!
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, Aster, Oliver, Stefan, Ferass, Clayton, Pablo, Luca, Peter, Antoine, Achill, bluebunny, Rob, Fauzan, Adam, Bart, Paul, Hugo B., Sicelo, Henrik, Lukas, Dylan, methanal, Sam, Barnabás, Ali, -akku-, Daniel K., Stanley, Vladimir S., Yu Watanabe, Eisenbahnfan, Robert M., Wren, Dang, Andreas, Richard Ac., Eric, DomHeadroom, Ingo, Luca, Michał, Max, Alexandre, Guido, Markus, cristian_ci, askiiart, Kidd, binarycraft007, v34びょう, dx, Neil, gnumdk, Szymon, Nick, Martin, Nardo45, Angelo, MagneFire, Federico, Daniel St., MariooB, Lynxis, Danny, Kieran, vognev, cizra, Sergey, Alistair, Diego, chiffa, Rudraksha, Alexander M., Hendra, dikasp, knuxify, Joel, Steven
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!
And what's next?
- Members of the postmarketOS community and wider Linux Mobile scene can be found at various upcoming events:
- 2026-08-06 to 09: FOSSY 2026 (Vancouver, CA)
- 2026-08-15 to 17: FrOSCon 2026 (Sankt Augustin, DE)
- 2026-09-25 to 27: The postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference (Aachen, DE)
Help wanted
You can send us topics to include in the next blog post by commenting in: #233
If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.