After 6 months of development, the postmarketOS 25.06 project, which develops the distribution, has been released Linux for mobile devices, based on the Alpine package base Linux, the standard C library Musl and the BusyBox utility suite. The goal of the project is to provide Linux- a distribution for smartphones and tablets that is independent of the official firmware support lifecycle and isn't tied to the standard solutions of major industry players. Builds have been prepared for 57 devices, including the PINE64 PinePhone Pro, Purism Librem 5, OnePlus 6, Fairphone 5, Google Nexus 10, Google Pixel 3a, Nokia N900, Lenovo A60xx, ASUS MeMo Pad 7, as well as various Samsung Galaxy and Xiaomi models. Limited experimental support is provided for over 600 devices.
The postmarketOS environment is unified and places all device-specific components in a separate package. All other packages are identical for all devices and are based on packages from the Alpine distribution. Linux. The builds use the vanilla kernel whenever possible. Linux, and if that's not possible, then kernels from firmware prepared by device manufacturers. KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh, GNOME Mobile, and Sxmo are offered as the primary user interfaces, but other environments are also available, including MATE, COSMIC, and Xfce.
In the new release:
- Added the ability to use the system manager systemd instead of the OpenRC init system. Systemd is used in builds with GNOME Mobile, KDE Plasma Mobile and Phosh. OpenRC is left in the build with Sxmo. The reason for adding support for systemd is the complication of maintaining the initialization stack based on OpenRC in the context of the ever-growing dependence of GNOME and KDE on systemd components. The existing layers for running GNOME and KDE without systemd do not support some necessary functions and have problems with maintenance. When using systemd in the distribution, it will be possible to implement new capabilities for granular privilege management, security, managing dependencies between services, supporting cgroups and using socket service activation.
- The number of ready-made assemblies has increased from 53 to 57. Support has been added for smartphones Google Pixel 3A XL, Motorola Moto G5 Plus, Xiaomi Redmi 7, Xiaomi Mi 9T, Redmi K20, Xiaomi POCO X3 NFC and Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro.
- Implemented camera support for smartphones OnePlus 6, Motorola Moto E5 Plus, Motorola Moto G5s, Xiaomi Redmi 3S, Xiaomi Redmi 4 Standard and Xiaomi Redmi 4A.
- For devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon 425/427/430/435 (MSM89x7) chipsets, such as Motorola Moto E5 Plus, Motorola Moto G5s, Xiaomi Redmi 3S and Xiaomi Redmi 4, support for the audio subsystem and charging management is included.
- The package database is synchronized with Alpine Linux 3.22.
- KDE Plasma Mobile has been updated to version 6.3.5 (previously version 6.2.4 was shipped). Compared to the previous release, the task switching interface has been modernized, window management capabilities have been expanded, the quick settings panel has been improved, support for manual screen orientation switching has been added, a traffic monitoring interface has been added, and the volume control widget has been improved.
- The GNOME Mobile user environment has been updated, featuring a GNOME Shell edition tailored for use on touchscreen smartphones and tablets. GNOME Mobile components have been migrated to the GNOME 48 branch (the previous release used GNOME 46). Changes include dynamic triple buffering for output, stacked notifications, a new font, and expanded window management tools.
- The Phosh environment, based on GNOME technologies and developed by Purism for the Librem 5 smartphone, has been updated to version 0.47 (previously version 0.43 was used). Among the changes: the ability to set wallpaper for the lock screen, expanded capabilities of the quick launch panel, support for searching in the file selection interface, adjusting the strength of haptic feedback, and displaying broadcast messages from the mobile operator. Instead of squeekboard, the Stevia on-screen keyboard is used by default, supporting auto-completion of words and a pop-up window for entering additional characters.
- The Sxmo (Simple X Mobile) graphical shell, based on the Sway compositing manager and adhering to the Unix philosophy, has been updated to version 1.17.1 (was 1.17.0).
- A new interface has been proposed in the installer, simplifying the installation of the distribution on laptops. The interface allows you to boot into live mode, install on the internal drive, perform initial setup and install additional packages.
- The package includes the mobile-config-thunderbird package, which changes the settings of the desktop version of the Thunderbird mail client for use as a mobile application.
- Improved mobile-config-firefox package to allow using regular Firefox on mobile devices.
- The openssh-client package has been discontinued by default and must now be installed manually. It is also installed as a dependency when installing the postmarketos-dev development kit, which includes alpine-sdk, bash, and coreutils.
Source: opennet.ru
