postmarketOS adoption keeps growing at a fast pace

May 7, 2020 04:35 GMT  ·  By

The adoption of Linux seems to be improving not only on the desktop but also on mobile, where projects like postmarketOS keep evolving at a super-fast pace.

And according to new data from Tux Phones, postmarketOS is already running on some 200 mobile devices, including here both phones and tablets, and this is without a doubt a notable achievement for the world of Linux.

While bringing Linux to a smartphone still faces a series of challenges and doing the whole thing isn’t necessarily a project for the Average Joe, there’s hope that the more developers join this effort, the easier eventually becomes to deploy operating systems like postmarketOS on any phone.

The third mobile operating system?

For example, someone has recently managed to install postmarketOS on an iPhone 7, something which a few years ago was considered totally impossible given Apple’s walled garden. But everyone with an iPhone 7 can do this by following the instructions shared by the developer on project-insanity.org.

“I hope this will bring further progress to custom Linux operating systems on Apple devices. There are already experiments with dual booting and partitioning. So maybe it could be possible in the future to get persistent storage on the phone for Linux systems!” the developer says.

But without a doubt, it’ll take years until Linux will be considered a worthy alternative to mobile operating systems like Android and iOS.

For the time being, it remains a project that’s mostly aimed at developers, enthusiasts, and power users who just want to experiment with Linux beyond the traditional desktop.

But with the right support, Linux on mobile phones would further evolve at an even faster pace, eventually becoming the third mobile operating system that so many people are hoping for after the demise of BlackBerry and Windows 10 Mobile.