Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (12/2026): Immutable Ambitions
Table of Contents
This past week: postmarketOS introduces Duranium immutable variant, PureOS Crimson beta and Sailfish OS 5.0.0.77 early access released, a Ubuntu Touch Q&A, Amazfish 2.9.0 and more! Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- postmarketOS Blog: Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS
- Jozef Mlich: Amazfish 2.9.0 was released
- Purism: PureOS Crimson Development Report: January and February 2026 – Beta Released
Worth Watching
- Continuum Gaming: New Sailfish OS Update 5.0.0.76/77 live on camera! (Continuum Gaming E513)
- Adrian Ortega: Enabling GPS On OnePlus 6/6T Running PostmarketOS
- UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 186. Work on 26.04 starting, and more!
- CodingBite: Linux Phones Can't Break Anymore — postmarketOS Duranium Explained
Worth Noting
- swick: "Instead of taking any part in the monthly wayland bashing bullshit, you could just read about how electron, one of the last X11 bastions, has adjusted to wayland. Super important work! https://www.electronjs.org/blog/tech-talk-wayland"
- Tuxdoctor: Sneak peek of the website for gathering the anonymous data from the mobile devices running LinuxComing soon to your pockets :)
- Logical_Error: "Pinephone Pro Linux mainlining thread Decided to make a thread on the work I'm doing on the Pinephone Pro and pin it to my profile. Here's the list of things I've done so far:- https://fosstodon.org/@Logical_Error/115523837605100152- https://fosstodon.org/@Logical_Error/115863006627226016 Mainlining Guide: https://forum.mainlining.org/t/upstream-pinephone-pro-patches/138Had to pause Pinephone Pro development because I got demotivated a bit, but hopefully I'll be able to continue in the near future. Stay tuned~"
Events
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #241 Fifty!
- Allan Day: GNOME Foundation Update, 2026-03-20
- Jakub Steiner: GNOME 50 Wallpapers
- Jakub Steiner: Friday Sketches (part 2)
- Phoronix: Cambalache 1.0 Released After Five Years For Designing Modern GTK UIs
Phosh
Catacomb
- UndeadLeech: "Did you know that Catacomb's window manager has built-in curling?Just tile a window, switch to the overview, then try and land it in the target zone using touch velocity!#linuxmobile #catacomb"
- UndeadLeech: "Catacomb's 1.4.0 release is out, with some minor QoL improvements: - Double-tap on the gesture handle now turns the display off - Better iio-sensor-proxy support - Improved touch velocity with different output scales and input polling rateshttps://github.com/catacombing/catacomb/releases/tag/v1.4.0#linuxmobile #catacomb"
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Time Zone Offsets and Type-Ahead on the Desktop
- KDE Announcements: KDE Plasma 6.6.3, Bugfix Release for March
- anditosan: FOSS BACKSTAGE DESIGN
- cordlandwehr: KJournald 26.04 Features
- Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.7's KWin Lands Support For 3D LUTs To Help With Modern GPUs
- Phoronix: SteamOS 3.8 Preview Preps For Steam Machine, KDE Plasma Desktop With Wayland By Default
Sailfish OS
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 19th March 2026 - Meetup in Lyon next Saturday
- Announcements - Sailfish OS Forum: [Release notes] Tampella 5.0.0.77 - EAS - Early Access
- jolla: "The next batch of Jolla Phone is now available with the adjusted memory pricing.The previous limited batch went fast! The demand from this community has been genuinely humbling ❤️ At the same time, the smartphone market faces utmost challenges with the memory component prices rocketing sky high. The next batch of the Jolla Phone ships with 8 GB RAM / 128 GB storage. If you want more, add the Memory Upgrade to your cart: 12 GB RAM and 256 GB storage for an additional 100€.Limited batch. 2 000 units. End of September 2026 delivery.99€ down payment to reserve your place.https://jolla.com/phone#Jolla #SailfishOS #DigitalSovereignty #PrivacyFirst #European #CommunityPowered"
- adampigg: Finally fixed an annoying bug in #amazfish. Some users with a particular ZeppOS 1 watch were saying that 'the last activity' would keep syncing multiple times.Didnt happen for me with ZeppOS 4, seems that device sends a different 'no more data' message! #smartwatch #linux
- #sailfishOS: @nixCraft Time to wipe Android and install some mobile Linux distro.(Personally I run #SailfishOS)
Ubuntu Touch
- UBports Forums OS: lets talk about pyqt6 in the lomri toolkit
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 186 call for questions
- UBports - Development - Issues: Missing client side decorations support
- #UbuntuTouch: Amazfish 2.9.0 is out! 🚀 Many changes packed in. Short version? Check the release notes. Long version? Read my blog. Highlights: ZeppOS support ⌚, Bangle.js sync 📊, Sport SummaryPage 🏃♂️, FitTrackee upload 🔗, PineTime updates 🌤️, and more! https://blog.mlich.cz/2026/03/amazfish-2-9-0-was-released/
- #UbuntuTouch: Since my phone is dead for a while now im back to #volla phone with #Ubuntutouch now.Looking forward to daily drive it for a few weeks.Setup with the #Ubports installer worked well enough.Seems like a lot has happened in the last few years regarding the base but #Lomiri is definetly still an aquired taste for me.Signal Desktop is working now though so thats a big upgrade.Happy to see my Apps WaydroidHelper and Gem still beeing maintained by vulenteers. #Linux #linux_on_mobile
Distributions
postmarketOS
- postmarketOS Blog: Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS
- Breaking updates in pmOS edge: New postmarketOS installations now by default use sudo-rs instead of doas
- Breaking updates in pmOS edge: pmaports and pmbootstrap default branch changed
- postmarketOS pmaports issues: xfce4, mate & lxqt after the removal of onboard from Alpine
- postmarketOS pmaports issues: usb-moded-ng features and functionality
- postmarketOS pmaports Merge Requests: Fix usb-moded UDC selection and wait for interface to be available before bringing connection up
- postmarketOS pmbootstrap issues: pmbootstrap install --sdcard appears to complete successfully but no changes to the medium
Others
- Purism: PureOS Crimson Development Report: January and February 2026 – Beta Released
- Emmanuele Bassi: Let’s talk about Moonforge
Apps
- Nitrux: Fiery, our web browser introduced in Nitrux 2.7.0, has been the default since Nitrux 3.9.1, and is getting a BIG upgrade. Architecture: Migrated the codebase to Qt6. Resolved Wayland and Hyprland rendering issues via GPU layer mutations and applied x86-64-v3 optimizations.Security: Eliminated SQL injection vulnerabilities, enforced strict private profile isolation, and integrated comprehensive ad and cookie consent blockers.🧵 [cont.]
- UndeadLeech: For Charon 1.6.0 I decided to steal a great feature from Organic Maps: You can now zoom in and out easier by double-tapping and moving the finger up and down.A full list of changes can be found in the release notes:https://github.com/catacombing/charon/releases/tag/v1.6.0#linuxmobile #catacomb #navigation
- jonathanknez: MP3 app specifically for Librem5 - available now
- alice: "ok, elastic is using gnome 50 platform now it also has a few new icons and i added dark screenshots. Looks like pretty much no gnome-adjacent store supports them yet, neither does flathub web ui. elementary AppCenter does tho(though it doesn't autoreload them)everyone else will just see 8 screenshots until stores start supporting this"
- Marknote 1.5.1
- Jozef Mlich: Amazfish 2.9.0 was released
- VolkerKrause: Another small preparation for traveling to Switzerland for #OpenTransport2026: #KDE Itinerary now warns when leaving the EU roaming regulation area if you happen to live inside that.
Kernel
- Phoronix: Linux Patches Updated To Steal Tasks For Improving CPU Utilization
- Phoronix: Linux 7.1 Adding DRM Dedicated CRTC Background Color Property
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 0/6] Enable new features for flipkart-rimob
- phone-devel: Re: [PATCH v6 0/8] iio: light: vcnl4000: add regulator support
Stack
- Phoronix: Vulkan 1.4.347 Debuts With Three New Extensions
- Phoronix: SysV Init 3.16 Released With Cleanups, Improved systemd Unit To SysV Script Conversion
- Phoronix: Wayland 1.25 Released With Color Management Now Fully Documented
- Phoronix: GNUnet 0.27 Released For Those With "Some Reasonable Pain Tolerance"
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2026-03-20
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?
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