14 DAY TRIAL // postmarketOS is the ambitious project that can bring Linux to mobile phones out there, and after three years of hard work, it has reached several important milestones, including booting on no less than 200 different devices.
While this doesn’t sound like a huge achievement for some, it’s certainly something truly notable given it’s based on a community effort that keeps getting more contributors.
postmarketOS is now based on Alpine Linux 3.12 stable, and the developing team explains that the platform currently boots on over 200 phones, albeit only the QEMU virtual device is supported in the main channel.
Categorized devices
And speaking of channels, postmarketOS now has several categories for the devices included in the development process, namely main, testing, and community.
“All existing device ports have been moved to the testing category, and can be moved to community or main depending on which features are working and how well maintained a port is. Only community and main devices will be cherry-picked to the stable branch,” the dev team says.
“There are also some devices pending to be moved into community from testing, like the Nokia N900, Xiaomi Redmi 4X, Motorola Moto G4 Play, Samsung Galaxy A3, Samsung Galaxy A5, Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Value Edition and Wileyfox Swift. This is mostly possible, because they run a mainline Linux kernel already, or in case of the MSM8916, are currently being mainlined. The MSM8974 devices are also candidates, such as the Nexus 5, Fairphone 2, OnePlus One and the Samsung Galaxy S5.”
For the time being, postmarketOS seems to be one of those projects that could really have a great future, but it all depends on how committed each contributor actually is to helping further improve the experience overall. At this point, postmarketOS can’t become your daily driver, but judging from all the improvements in the last three years, the days when it could be one may not be that far.