LINux on MOBile

Phosh 0.52.0 released with two-finger swipe brightness control on lockscreen, Phosh e.V. publishes 2025 annual report, Jolla Phone surpasses 6,800 pre-orders, Nemo Mobile progresses toward openSUSE and OBS with Qt6 migration and device lock improvements, Kaidan 0.14.0 brings advanced media sharing, GNOME Maps 50.alpha redesigns sidebar and switches to Transitous for all public transit routing, several Year in Review posts, some review posts and more. Enjoy!

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

• Aaron's Blog: A 2025 review of Mobile Linux with postmarketOS v25.12
• Matthew Exon Long Form: New Phone – Matthew Exon Long Form
• alaraajavamma on FuriLabs blog: Community Effort and Glory Days with Pinephone
• Phosh.mobi Blog: Phosh 2025 in Retrospect
• Phosh.mobi e.V.: Annual Report 2025
• Ayakael: FOSS Recap 2025
• Nemo Mobile UX team: Nemomobile 2025 June to December
  • Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Nemomobile 2025 June to December
• LINux on MOBile: 2025: Year in Review. Just in case you missed it!
  • Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: 2025: Year in Review
• s1m.fr: 5 years of UnifiedPush

Worth Watching

• Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E502: Sailfish OS – Foil Auth & SailOTP
• Orang Desa: SAILFISH OS on Redmi Note 8
• Emmanuel Explores: Jolla Phone's Untold Story: #Sailfish OS Rise & Epic Fall Explained with @Sivabharani #Jollaphone
• Techspheres: Oneplus 6 | Sailfish OS | Tampella | Linux operating system | Gesture based OS
• DanOpcode: The New Jolla Phone: Why I'm NOT Buying It
• Anino Ni Kugi: Air Mouse mode in Ubuntu Touch using a Wireless HDMI Adapter #linuxphone
• daunsoft: PostmarketOS SXMO 12.25 on Poco F1 | Minimalist Linux Mobile
• daunsoft: Trying PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile – Linux Phone Experience
• qkall: sxmo new years ish #sxmo #mobilelinux #postmarketos #edge
• PlayStationGamerShark1528: Installing postmarketOS on a Galaxy S5 but Everything Goes Wrong
• Linux Nation: Linux Smartphone als Alltagssystem? – Mein Fazit nach 12 Monaten mit dem FuriPhone FLX1, (YouTube)
• Cross Platform Adventures: PinePhone BETA running .NET 10 Kestrel Server to locally host a React Website.

Worth Noting

• martijnbraam: Maybe with the current RAM prices people will start writing efficient software again. First hell freezes over.
• opensourceopenmind: … Cost is an issue whenever niche small-batch hardware is involved, but since these companies do not (thankfully) subsidse the costs by monetising our data or get funding by being in bed with governments, paying the painfully high prices out of our own pockets appears to be the only way to fund #MobileLinux hardware. For me, this translates to collecting and buying a phone every 5-10 years.We can help funding by doing free marketing for these projects and if we can influence businesses and government departments into placing large orders, this can help #LinuxMobile companies achieve commercial success and subsidise the costs for us poor folks!#funding
• thibaultamartin: "First impressions about @postmarketOS with @phosh 1. Wow everything is much snappier than I thought! Congrats! 2. As a GNOME enthusiast, I feel at home …"
• thibaultamartin: "I was reading @linmob's 2025 retrospective and I stumbled upon Pocketblue.Basically, immutable Fedora for the OnePlus 6. Wow.https://pocketblue.github.io/devices/oneplus-sdm845/"
• Lemmy - postmarketOS: postmarketOS is genuinely amazing on ultra low end PCs (details in the post)
• New postmarketOS Wiki pages: Catacomb. See, I knew I forget a UI in my 'Year in Review' post. Nice to see it being added to postmarketOS!

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

• This Week in GNOME: #230 Happy New Year!

Phosh

• Phosh.mobi Releases: Phosh 0.52.0
• Phosh.mobi Blog: Phosh 2025 in Retrospect
• Phosh.mobi e.V.: Annual Report 2025
• #phosh: @phosh #wireplumber 0.5.13 containing the necessary changes was released a couple of days ago 🙏 and is already in #Debian 🙏 so I built #feedbackd with DEB_BUILD_PROFILES=pkg.feedbackd.media-roles, installed the result and from a quick test is seems to be working nicely. The next #pipewire release will fix a bug regarding volume restore with media roles and hopfully we can then looking into turning this on by default in #phosh afterwards.
• fizzo: "If you want a classy look for your #MobileLinux phone and want to avoid getting distracted by the launcher wallpaper, you can use imagemagick to create a blurred version: magick photo.jpg -blur 0x16 photo_blur.jpg#phosh #postmarketOS"

Plasma Ecosystem

• Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: new year, new accessibility features!
• Nate Graham: 8 years of “This Week in Plasma”
• Nate Graham: Highlights from 2025
• jbb: 39C3
• Volker Krause: 39C3
• anditosan: Ocean Development – 2025 Recap
• rabbitic translator: KDE onboarding is good now
• #plasmamobile: hello_xr on #monado on #postmarketos edge with #plasmamobile on a #shiftphone 6mq, using the #turnip Vulkan driver. Only a small patch to monado needed because libusb does not initialize when the kernel does not have usbfs enabled.
• Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.6 Fixes A Common Panel-Related Crash, Improves OpenBSD Support

Sailfish OS

• sailfishosnews: "Jolla Phone update 📱The new #Jolla Phone has passed 6'500 pre-orders (10,000 needed by Jan 2026 to unlock the new TOH). Planned specs include a MediaTek Dimensity 7000-series chip, up to 12 GB RAM / 256 GB storage, 4G/5G, dual SIM + microSD, and a 50 MP Sony main camera.Details: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/next-gen-jolla-phone-update-12-25/26509Pre-order: https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder#SailfishOS #Linux"
• poetaster: Announcing version 1.2.3 of Tooter, your friendly #SailfishOs Mastodon client. Fixes the Norwegian Translations and adds a view on Trending. I'm a bit mixed on the later, but it's been requested a couple of times and it's now there. Up at https://github.com/poetaster/harbour-tooter/releases/tag/1.2.3 and coming to chum, harbour and openrepos ... soon.
• secbox: Understanding that it's probably nowhere close to as good as the #GoogleTensor chip or #SamsungKnox, has anyone done an analysis of the #HardwareSecurity of the @jolla phone line?#security #MobileSecurity #JollaPhone #SailfishOS
• @sailfishOSnews: The revival of The Other Half for the new #Jolla Phone would certainly be nice... https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/the-other-half-returns-community-innovation-program/26011Pre-order campaign: https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-preorder#SailfishOS #Linux

Ubuntu Touch

• UBports - Development - Issues: [Qt 6] re-enable tests for Qt 5 builds (and optionally Qt 6 builds)
• UBports - Development - Issues: Support for Miracast over Infrastructure
• UBports - Development - Issues: [Qt 6] "Favicon" in the tab switcher is enlarged
• UBports - Development - Issues: accounts-qml-module: Enable Qt 6 QML module build
• UBports - Development - Issues: Push notifications on Teleports not working
• UBports - Development - Issues: [Qt 6] Qt 5's Ubuntu.Web (and by extension Ubuntu.Components.Extras.Browser) is broken
• #UbuntuTouch: UBUNTU TOUCH on TABLET Have you tried Ubuntu Touch on a tablet? In addition to the officially supported tablet models listed on the Ubuntu Touch website www.ubuntu-touch.io/ have you tried Ubuntu Touch on other tablet models?If YES, which ones (Brand + Model) and what were the results?Please comment in comments.@ubuntu@ubuntu.social @ubuntu@lemmy.ml #Ubuntu #UBUNTUtouch #Ubuntu#MobileOperatingSystem #Linux#TabletOperatingSystem #UBports #LinuxCommunity #TechNews #UBportsCommunity #LinuxNews#CanonicalYes, and it works just great.Yes, but I've had some problems.Not yet but i'll like to try it soon!Nope (why not?)

Nemo Mobile

• Jozef Mlich: Nemomobile 2025 June to December
• nemomobile: "Nemomobile 2025 June to DecemberThe progress is not as fast as all of us hope for, but development continues steadily. Recent work includes improvements to the device lock implementation, moving the platform towards openSUSE and OBS, various fixes and cleanups across Glacier components, Qt 6–related updates, and successful testing on new hardware.https://nemomobile.net/pages/nemomobile-2025-june-to-december/"

Distributions

• Breaking updates in pmOS edge: Reverting the systemd-boot integration for chromebooks
• Breaking updates in pmOS edge: USB stack reworked for GNOME Mobile, Phosh, and Plasma Mobile
• craftyguy: "After many hours staring at logs and trying to reproduce/debug an issue that seemed to happen once every dozen or so boots... I miiiiiight have a fix for the Google Pixel 3a rotation sensor being inverted on #postmarketOS... If you have one of these devices and are running pmOS edge, please help me test this :Dhttps://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/7681Can be tested with: doas apk add mrtest && mrtest upgrade 7681"
• postmarketOS pmbootstrap tags: 3.8.0
• Mobian mobian-recipes Issues: Please consider installing Recommends by default for forky

Apps

• Kaidan.im: Kaidan 0.14.0: Advanced Media Sharing and Registration Provider Filtering
• flathub: "438 million downloads, over 446 new apps, and 21% year-over-year growth. See what else 2025 brought including top apps and categories, hidden gems, and more in the 2025 Flathub Year in Review: https://flathub.org/year-in-review/2025What is the most surprising to you? 👀#Flathub #Flatpak #Linux #OpenSource #FOSS #LinuxApps"
• mlundblad: "Just tagged Maps 50.alpha and libshumate 1.6.alpha for GNOME 50:Containing, among others, the new sidebar redesign, public transit journey redesign, using Transitous for all public transit routingm, and porting of UI templates to Blueprint for Maps.And for libshumate the option to compile without the vector renderer has been removed, the vector renderer has gained support for "global-state" expressions.#gnomemaps #libshumate #libadwaita #BlueprintCompiler #mapstodon #transitous"
• nekohayo: @fabioFor those it may interest: let it be known that we also have a #GNOME application (called "Passes") for handling #PKPass or #esPass tickets, for #LinuxMobile travelers and partygoers in abandoned warehouses kitted up for a rave.I would be happy to see someone contribute some sort of inter-app integration between "Passes" and GNOME Calendar someday: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/issues/1127#GNOMECalendar #travelling #travel
• @deus: Vibe coded this with the ravens at the park and polished up at home #linux #phosh #flx1s its based off LinkHub on fdroid! its a 79kb gnome app!
• LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Reflection

Kernel

• phone-devel: Re: mainline on Samsung S4 mini (seranoltexx), earlyfb patch?
• phone-devel: mainline on Samsung S4 mini (seranoltexx), earlyfb patch?
• phone-devel: Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] arm64: dts: qcom: sdm845-db845c: Use pad fn instead of defining own
• Phoronix: New Linux Patches Allow More Easily Changing The Tux Kernel Boot Logo

Stack

• Lennart Poettering: Mastodon Stories for systemd v259
• Phoronix: Devuan 6.1 Released For Latest Debian 13 "Init Freedom" Without systemd
• Phoronix: SDL 3.4 Released With Many New APIs, Better Emscripten & Native PNG Support
• Phoronix: Box64 v0.4 Improves Support For DRM Protected Games, Steam Is Now More Stable ronix.com/news/Aeryn-OS-Ends-2025)
• conservancy: "U-Boot has joined SFC! We're thrilled such a storied and important project has decided to join up with us. Thanks to U-Boot, so many devices are able to have open boot loaders and preserve our digital rights.https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/dec/29/u-boot-has-joined-sfc/ "

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

If your project's cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please just put it into this pad for the next one! Since I am collecting many things there, this get's you early access if you will ;-) If you just stumble on a thing, please put it in there too - all help is appreciated!

Guest posts wanted!

Your guest posts are welcome! And if you prefer to post them on your own blog, feel free to submit a short teaser post to linmob.net linking to your content.