The release of the postmarketOS 23.06 project has been published, which develops a Linux distribution for smartphones based on the Alpine Linux package base, the Musl standard C library and the BusyBox utility set. The goal of the project is to provide a Linux distribution for smartphones that does not depend on the official firmware support life cycle and is not tied to standard solutions of the main industry players that set the development vector. Builds are prepared for PINE64 PinePhone, Purism Librem 5 and 29 community supported devices including Samsung Galaxy A3/A5/S4, Xiaomi Mi Note 2/Redmi 2, OnePlus 6, Lenovo A6000, ASUS MeMo Pad 7 and even Nokia N900. Limited experimental support has been provided for over 300 devices.
The postmarketOS environment is unified as much as possible and puts all device-specific components into a separate package, all other packages are identical for all devices and are based on Alpine Linux packages. When possible, the builds use the vanilla Linux kernel, and if this is not possible, then the kernels from the firmware prepared by the device manufacturers. KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh, GNOME Mobile and Sxmo are offered as the main user shells, but other environments can be installed, including MATE and Xfce.
In the new release:
- The number of devices officially supported by the community has not changed - as in the previous release, 31 devices were declared to be supported, but one device was removed and one device was added. The PINE64 PineTab tablet has been excluded from the list due to lack of an accompanying person. However, the PINE64 PineTab support components remain in the development branch and may be returned to the stable branch if a maintainer appears. Among the new devices on the list is the Samsung Galaxy Grand Max smartphone.
- Implemented the ability to use the GNOME Mobile user environment, which uses an edition of the GNOME Shell, adapted for use on smartphones and tablets with a touch screen. The components of GNOME Mobile are based on the GNOME Shell 44 branch of Git. A mobile version of the GNOME Software application has been prepared to manage the installation of applications.
- The Phosh environment based on GNOME technologies and developed by Purism for the Librem 5 smartphone has been updated to version 0.26. Compared to the previous release of postmarketOS, Phosh has added a new plugin for displaying information about the user and emergency calls, plugins are allowed to set their own settings, the design of the quick launch menu has been updated, animation of icons in the status bar has been implemented, and the configurator has been improved. By default, the mobile version of the Evince application is used to view documents.
- The KDE Plasma Mobile shell has been updated to version 5.27.5 (previously version 5.26.5 was shipped), a detailed review of which was published earlier. The program interface for sending SMS/MMS has been changed.
- The graphical shell Sxmo (Simple X Mobile), based on the Sway composite manager and adhering to the Unix philosophy, has been updated to version 1.14, in which the processing of switching to sleep mode has been redesigned, the sxmobar panel has been used for the status bar, the icons in the status bar have been replaced, the components for work with MMS and logs.
- By default, the installation of files with translations is implemented, and the base locale is changed from C.UTF-8 to en_US.UTF-8.
- The ability to distribute the Internet to other devices via a USB port (USB tethering) has been brought to a working state.
- In installation images, the minimum password size has been reduced from 8 to 6 characters.
- Implemented out-of-the-box sound and backlight control on the PineBook Pro smartphone.
Source: opennet.ru