Conferences has been the main theme of this month. We had stands at FrOSCon (photo, next to our friends from Phosh), FOSSY (pictured above) as well as DEFCON and the following postmarketOS / Linux Mobile related talks were given:
- Automated testing of a phone operating system (Luca at FrOSCon)
- Push-Benachrichtigungen. Dezentral und OpenSource (Daniel G. at FrOSCon)
- Random Cool Things from postmarketOS (a linux-based mobile OS) (Ranny at DEFCON)
- Controlling our devices: linux on mobile (Ranny at DEFCON)
Besides that we have of course been very busy planning our own conference and are happy to announce that the schedule is now live! For those who did not get a ticket, the event is completely booked now but we are trying to do video recordings and/or live streams so you can watch the talks at home (no promises for that though since this is our first event). If all goes well, we might even follow up with another one next year. For those who will be there, make sure to join the Matrix chat / IRC channel.
Organizational
OSUOSL, who maintain gitlab.postmarketos.org, have reacted to slowdowns we have observed across the site and made it significantly faster by moving git repositories to SSDs. Thanks, Lance!
Paul has joined the infrastructure team.
NLnet and NGI Zero Core related news
A production debuginfod server for postmarketOS and Alpine was set up, "allowing developers to automatically fetch debug symbols during crash analysis with tools like coredumpctl and gdb" (!9468, sync-debuginfod, milestone 34)
An update was posted by Rich on the collation + i18n support in musl libc project: "I'm pleased to announce a big step in the #musl locale overhaul project: collation is working! This is the result of a long project to design data structures and logic that would admit honoring the full Unicode Collation Algorithm rules, including equivalence under normalization, and keep the size of collation weight tables for the entirety of Unicode under control."
And last but not least, our latest proposal was accepted: "This project is about releasing the first version of postmarketOS that is immutable, as well as significantly improving automated hardware testing for postmarketOS. With these efforts, we will be able to eliminate whole classes of bugs and bring postmarketOS closer to be used by everyday people."
Thanks to Clayton (debuginfod work), Rich (musl work), Pablo and Oliver (organizational work) and of course NLnet and NGI Zero Core!
Guidelines for proprietary software
The last monthly post said:
Victoria made Valve's Steam run really well on postmarketOS with the Ayaneo Pocket S2. She wrote a great blog post Taming the Steam arm64 client (on pmOS) that goes deep into how exactly it works and concludes with: "But the end result is beautiful. The device behaves like a little Steam Deck and you wouldn't notice, that it runs on a completely different processor architecture." Given that steam is proprietary software, we still need to discuss if and how we would make this available to users officially in postmarketOS.
Casey has been busy figuring out the "if and how" and wrote a PMCR for that purpose, which has been thoroughly discussed and was eventually merged. This is not about packaging/distributing proprietary software directly, but about packaging software that basically bootstraps specific proprietary software such as Steam. It also doesn't mean we accept any such bootstrapping code, but rather that we decide on a case-by-case basis. "Software that is antithetical to the postmarketOS mission should not be condoned within the project and, as a general rule, proprietary software should be avoided as much as possible. Enabling proprietary software in postmarketOS should be strongly justified and serve a clear purpose that aligns with the postmarketOS mission."
There are also important safeguards in the PMCR, such as the rule that we can't install such bootstrap software implicitly for existing installs (so for the Steam use case, there would likely be a separate UI package that you would need to select / a separate postmarketOS image to download), the user must be informed about the software, the bootstrap software must be maintained by at least 2 people who are a well-known figure in the community, access for the proprietary software must be limited and the whole thing must be properly documented.
If you are interested in the details and exact wording, give PMCR 0013: Guidelines for Proprietary Software a read. Thanks Casey!
pmaports
device-generic-x86_64is now using the generic kernel packages from postmarketOS instead of the Alpine kernels. "Having these kernels in postmarketOS means that we have full control over the kernel configuration and build process, which allows us to integrate them with our kernel configuration checks." Shortly after the switch we had some typical laptop features missing (wifi, audio, touchpad, camera, but they were added quickly afterwards and are now part of our kconfigchecks). Thanks Clayton, Aelin, Bart!linux-postmarketos-qcom-sc7280was upgraded to 7.2.2 and now has an enabled Fairphone 5 rear main camera (!9442). Thanks Luca, everybody who tested and people who contributed upstream!apkmr is a new way to test merge requests from pmaports and Alpine's aports, that respects upgrades ("Running apk upgrade -Ua is a safe operation on a testing system"), allows getting new packages from the merge request with
apkand more. It is a spiritual successor tomrtest. Thanks Achill!
Misc
Matt from Sendero Linux wrote a nice blog post called Daily driving postmarketOS (Summer 2026) about his experiences with our immutable version. "A few weeks ago, there was a new image of postmarketOS released that had a bug which prevented the device from booting. On a traditional mutable system, this could have meant a big headache of effort to recover the system. On Duranium, after three failed attempts to boot, the system automatically falls back to the previous image that did successfully boot. This feature brings such peace of mind. Craftyguy was able to diagnose the issue and send a patch upstream, and newer images are successfully updating again. But it was nice to experience the promise of immutable systems in action." Sendero Linux is supporting postmarketOS and Phosh.mobi e.V. with donations. If you live in the US, you can order a OP6T with Duranium pre-installed from their shop.
An entertaining ~9 min video "I Replaced my iPhone with Linux. Here's What Happened." appeared the other day, which gives a good look at how somebody who is new to postmarketOS can currently experience installing it for the first time. It has high production quality, probably reached a lot of people who didn't know about postmarketOS before and does note the experimental nature of the project. Thanks, SwitchandClick!
Powered by
The following people wrote patches that have been merged since the last monthly blog post. Thank you very much for improving postmarketOS!
Aster, Aelin, Clayton, Pablo, Stefan, Oliver, Luca, Ingo, carlosjarenom, Ferass, Eisenbahnfan, Rudraksha, Andreas, Achill, Rob, Adam, MariooB, Casey, Neil, Eric, vognev, Anton, Henrik, Bart, Willow, Barnabás, Hugo B., Sicelo, Federico, Crosta04, Ali, Patrycja, Thomas, Alexander M., Chris V., bluebunny, Jianhua, Spark, Lukas, Robert M., Linus, Jan P., Petr, Paul, VaporGame, Alexandre Marquet, grorp, knuxify, Markus, Dang, User8395, Pavel Z., Vishwas, Brady, Бурмалда, Nikita, cristian_ci, Scott, Antony, Alderpaw, Val, FileX, ΞЖKƆ/QVH, Affe, Matt, Arin, Duje, Matthew, Alexey M.
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?
- 2026-09-18 to 20: Datenspuren (Dresden, DE)
- Frieder will give a talk there: How-To: Mainline Linux auf dein Handy porten
- 2026-09-25 to 27: The postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference (Aachen, DE)
- 2026-10-17 OpenSource Conference 2026 Tokyo/Fall (Tokyo, JP)
Help wanted
You can send us topics to include in the next blog post by commenting in: #237
If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.