postmarketOS Blog

Linux on Mobile has been progressing steadily in recent years, and is in a state suitable for very early adopters and tech enthusiasts. Definitely not for the general population IMHO. See: https://postmarketos.org/ FWIW, it's not just the EU that needs this urgently: most of humanity sorely needs a trustworthy mobile OS that's not designed against their interests.

It's a lost cause. We need to focus on pmOS: https://postmarketos.org/ With both Android and Chromium, we're ultimately at Google's mercy. btw, does anyone know if Huawei is following along with this in their fork?

I'm with you on the sunsetting of ChromeOS, but I'd like to offer a counterpoint to your experience of the Duet. I've been using the newer Lenovo Duet 5 with PostmarketOS[0] (linux for ARM) as a daily driver for more than a year and it is almost always great (minus no functioning webcam, which is abysmal anyways)! [0] https://postmarketos.org/

PostmarketOS is an incredible project worth supporting: http://postmarketos.org/ They're trying to do for smartphones what PC-compatibles did for home computers: deliver a standardized general-purpose operating system across different hardware.

In no particular order, here's the ones I've been following: -https://postmarketos.org/ -https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ -https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ I'm the most optimistic about Postmarket in the long run, but the others are actual hardware so there's that.

Unfortunately, your best bet will be PostMarketOS[0]... It's nowhere near ready for everyday use though, I'm afraid. [0]https://postmarketos.org/

I've run Replicant (as an exercise, not for serious privacy/security requirements), but I don't really recommend Replicant. Replicant drawbacks include: * Starved for developer time (e.g., low device support, slow/no updates for known exploits, question of how many eyeballs seeing changes, no current semi-secure way to browse Web). * Only kinda barely minimally almost works. * The supported hardware devices are not only few and old, but have fundamental security weaknesses in hardware. * Android is a huge code base, and, going forward, to some degree you're at the mercy of whatever the developer decides to do with it. * You're trying to adopt a platform that was, to some extent, designed around surveillance of the user. You can disable a lot of snooping, but you would design it very differently if privacy&security were goals. Librem5 is sorta an option, if you can afford it, though they still use closed hardware black boxes. (Also, even when two black boxes are "isolated", and you think you control the communication channel, you don't necessarily.) It's too bad that FirefoxOS didn't work out. The Gecko layer and up could've been moved to a purer Linux stack (ditching the Android build tree monstrosity), and to more trustworthy hardware. Personally, I'm hoping we go back to the original Linux emphasis on mainline kernel, maintainable open drivers, blob-free. The closest effort I've seen is PostmarketOS [1], but it's still in an early state, and it could also be a…

Except Microsoft officially stopped supporting Windows XP in 2014[1], and they had already extended support much longer than they had wanted to because XP was so long-lived and customers pushed back against having to upgrade to Vista. Vista support completely ended last year, and mainstream support for 7 ended in 2015, and 8.1 last month[2]. If you upgraded that decade-old computer to a secure OS then it will almost certainly run terribly. It's fine to run Photoshop 7 on an old PC that's not connected to the internet, but how realistic or useful is that? Under the old desktop upgrade model it's easier to run an unmaintained OS, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Edit: Obviously running a lightweight linux distro is an option for the more technically minded, and it would be great to see projects like https://www.postmarketos.org become more widespread for extending the life of tablet and phone hardware. [1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/14223/windows-xp-end-of-suppo… [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search?alpha=Windows%208

Great project based on Alpine: https://postmarketos.org

The implications for the ROM community would be amazing. Reading this, the implication is that the LineageOS project can make a single build that would work on all Android devices that have 1) Treble support and 2) an unlocked bootloader. In the text it is in fact implied that Google themselves make such a 'single' AOSP build/system partition that the device needs to be able to run to pass Google Play certification. It would no longer mean device specific builds and hoping your device is supported. No longer would it mean that you would have to tactically buy popularish Snapdragon devices to have a chance of some aftermarket support after the vendor inevitably leaves you. You would be able to run Lineage on (Exynos-based) Samsung and Huawei phones, which is either impossible or too much trouble to worth the effort at the moment. Hell, in theory alternate non Android-based, OSes like PostmarketOS [1] could write their OS to be compatible with the Android HAL and work with that. Stuff like this would have likely made Canonical's life in running Ubuntu on Android devices much easier too. Vendors could make a system partition with their latest skin version and distribute it to all their devices, instead of only their flagship ones, meaning feature updates can be deployed in a much broader way than is done now. Driver updates will likely still be an issue, but security fixes that pertain to the Android base can still be deployed. I really, really hope the implications here…

> - I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same. Maybe look into contributing to existing alternatives like PostmarketOS. https://postmarketos.org/

Not really a solution at the moment if you do not want to give money to Google by buying a Pixel (hopefully the deal with Motorola will work). Long term I would probably have more hopes in https://postmarketos.org/

Oh and Sailfish OS [0], Postmarket OS [1], and whatever Purism runs [2]. [0] https://sailfishos.org/ [1] https://postmarketos.org/ [2] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

"an OS that behaves like a real computer that you can put on an old/cheap commodity phone": https://postmarketos.org/ "an app that creates a programmable environment layered over and isolated from the suffocating mobile OS": Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) on newer Android versions provides a hypervisor and a hardware-accelerated graphics (VirGL) for AVF virtual machines, allowing users to run an isolated Linux GUI desktop with low overhead.

postmarketos would probably be the next in line for consideration: https://postmarketos.org/ and then maybe ubuntu touch: https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/ edit: list of supported lineagos devices (would have been crucial to note in the OP that only certain devices are supported; some have "unofficial" third party support as well, not listed on this link): https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

Break free from Android... by installing Android? I'm not sure it's really breaking free when the first task to do is intall Google Play Services so your banking app works. Sounds like we can't actually breaking free from Android and iOS. Maybe with Linux like the Fedora Atomic for mobile devices? https://github.com/pocketblue/pocketblue Or PostmarketOS? https://postmarketos.org/ Even then banking would probably only work through the browser... Sad state of the world really.

This is based on bootc (bootable containers), so note that the OS build is described in a normal Dockerfile: https://github.com/pocketblue/pocketblue/blob/main/Containerfile which is then run by the Github action (or locally). Very similar to how Universal Blue, Bazzite, Bluefin etc. build at https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite (see their Containerfile), but for mobile. Has a similar mission to https://postmarketos.org, but with a different build system AFAICT

Hi. I have a Google Pixel 3a running PostmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ and it holds up pretty well. My phone lost 20% today with light usage and will maybe lose 60% if I scroll social media a lot. I was actually surprised it is this good. I reinstalled recently and before the reinstall I had much worse battery life (Maybe 8 hours with normal usage). I think it was because of Syncthing running in the background. It is also possible to use s2idle suspend which will improve the battery life even more but you will not be able to receive calls during suspend (though that may also be fixed in the future)

Checkout https://postmarketos.org Those vendor provided kernel trees let you run a real Linux distribution on your phone.

Here you go: https://mobian-project.org/ postmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux: https://postmarketos.org/

I guess it depends a bit on your definition of "phone" and "realistic". I have a pine64 phone I mean to revisit - probably with a version of https://postmarketos.org/ . I think we might get there unless fuchsia and google abandon the Linux kernel completely - for a more apple like lockdown - but I don't think we're there yet.

Edit: A sibling post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40602632) points to a Mastodon thread that says it runs postmarketOS, a Linux distro for phones: https://postmarketos.org/ ------ (Original post) Not the website owner, but isn't an (Android) phone just a small Linux computer? There are a bunch of web server apps (https://play.google.com/store/search?q=web%20server&c=apps) or you can root it and run whatever software you want on it? In my mind it's not so different than running a web server off a Raspberry Pi or similar.

Some more questions about software support. It seems the device is using android. Do you have any plan to support mainline linux kernel? It could allow the possibility to use native linux distro like PostmarketOS (https://postmarketos.org/) for device longevity. Your team could also benefit from delegating some softare support effort to linux kernel team.

The main OS supported by KDE Plasma Mobile is postmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ So you have to have a phone that is supported by it (or some other Linux distribution for smartphones) and then you can install it and run KDE Plasma Mobile More info is here https://plasma-mobile.org/get/

Nobody else (that I saw) mentioned it, but PostmarketOS [0] has a decent number of (community) supported devices, is Free and more than a de-Googled Android distro - it's actually based on Alpine Linux. I've previously run it on my Pinephone Pro, but images are available for multiple Samsung handsets as well [1] [0] https://postmarketos.org/ [1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

You actually have 80% of the control of your phone after rooting it. The remaining 20% is due to kernel variation and not having all mainline features. Most Android distributions are tailor-made Linux kernel that is very old and is stitched by cherrypicking some mainline commits. If you want full control check out postmarketOS: https://postmarketos.org/. With the right hardware and software you can even run Kubernetes on it (I'm planning on running such cluster)

For a single-purpose device running custom software you wrote, I would consider Linux which is not an Android. Couple years ago, I wanted something similar on a smartphone, and postmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ worked rather well for me. The OS is based on Alpine Linux.

Yeah, supporting Android devices in mainline kernel would be really useful also for projects like postmarketOS (https://postmarketos.org/)

Maybe postmarketOS? https://postmarketos.org/ Discussed on HN a couple of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postmarketOS

Thats basically the goal of the postmarketOS project: https://postmarketos.org/