Cell phone Linux postmarketOS: v25.06 relies on systemd

“Finally here!” celebrate the developers of postmarketOS: “This is it, the thing that adds systemd to postmarketOS!”. Announced back in March last year, support has now landed in the official postmarketOS v25.06 release.

The postmarketOS maintainers announced the new version in a blog post. It is based on Alpine Linux 3.22 –, a lightweight Linux distribution designed to be particularly lean. Many software packages have been updated by the maintainers, but are not necessarily the latest versions. Gnome 48, KDE Plasma Mobile 6.3.5 and the Phosh 0.46.0 desktop environment have replaced their older predecessors; only Sxmo is still included in version 1.17.1.

According to a Mastodon survey, the new default wallpaper is the green “Evergreen”. A new “os-installer” user interface simplifies installation, primarily on laptops, netbooks, or convertibles – simply transfer to a USB stick, boot from it and create an encrypted installation on the internal memory. “mobile-config-thunderbird” is designed to transform the desktop program into a mobile-friendly Linux mobile app. “mobile-config-firefox”, on the other hand, has received various user interface corrections and improvements. The OpenSSH package is no longer included in the standard installation, but can be retrofitted manually from a command call(apk add openssh-client or as a dependency of the postmarketos-dev package).

Camera support, audio and charging support

The developers have added initial camera support for smartphones with MSM89x7 SoCs and the OnePlus 6. They have also activated support for audio and charging for almost every device with the kernel. In addition, the flashlight and support for suspend mode for the pmi8950 model. Device ports with downstream kernels have been split into their categories. The programmers have created the postmarketOS v25.06 release image for the devices in the community and testing categories; the downstream category is left empty-handed.

In general, the developers have included “tons of kernel upgrades, improvements, and bug fixes for all devices” in the v25.06 release. The community category now lists 60 supported smartphones, six of which are new additions. Supported devices are listed on a separate website of the postmarketOS project, where the images for the respective devices can also be found.

Installation instructions for postmarketOS have been provided by Make. c't also took a look at the operating system alternative for supposedly outdated smartphones and mobile devices.

A year ago, postmarketOS v24.06 was released. This version added newly supported devices and brought the base and packages up to date.

(dmk)