Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (15/2025): Boot your phone from USB
Table of Contents
This past week:
- USB boot capability demonstrated for multiple Linux phones,
- a loaded postmarketOS monthly update,
- Furilabs FLX1 gains PipeWire camera support ... and way, way more!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- tbernard: GNOME STF 2024 Project Report
- postmarketOS Blog: postmarketOS in 2025-03: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n
- Liliputing: Phosh 0.46.0 brings customization, UI improvements to the mobile Linux user interface
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Q1/2025 Progress: Over 20 apps added and many improvements
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Q1/2025 Progress: Over 20 apps added and many improvements
- Purism: Made in America: Purism’s Liberty Phone and the Vision of Security, Privacy, and Independence
- 404 Media: How a $2,000 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured
Worth Watching
- Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E464: SFOS – App
Fahrplan: Not only for German train rides - neochapay: NemoMobile first start on OrangePI 3b v2.1
- Pai (The Dev): I speed run port PostmarketOS to galaxy J7 2016 (Kinda?)(19:01Min)
- Sad panic: Droidian (Mobian / Debian for Android) - Samsung Galaxy M21 (2025-04-08)
- Jitube: Tester PostMarketOs sur Nokia N900
- Linux Nation: FuriPhone FLX1 Linux Smartphone nach 6 Monaten (Langzeit-Review). German; unfortunately the automatically generated (and then translated) subtitles are quite inaccurate. Definitely worth watching though if you can understand German.
Worth Noting
- adrianyyy: "blood, sweat and tears but it works! Finally I can boot my phone from a USB stick"
- matthewcroughan: Generic aarch64 NixOS installer via USB Boot on U-Boot -> Grub on a qcm6490 thanks to the genius of @cas and more#weeknotes #nixos
- fakeshell: "is it too late to join the #pipewire party? i hope not, or else my #flx1 will be sadall applications that use pipewire can finally utilize the camera (adding to our list of v4l, qtmultimedia and android apps)one issue we are facing is that aperture is not very happy with the back cameras, so applications like #GNOME snapshot or authenticator will have the preview flipped. captured frames are surprisingly not flipped tho:https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/snapshot/-/issues/261#furios #furilabs #LinuxMobile #mobilelinux" @rmader thanks a lot Robert! that was indeed the solutionit now detects and works fine
- riscv64: "linux-apple has been moved to its own GitHub org. Also, to avoid trademark issues, it has been renamed. Considering fork networks, new repositories are made instead of simply transferring the old ones.hopefully documentation will be improved soon https://github.com/HoolockLinux"
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: My take on the "State of Mobile Linux"
- vkc: "There's a huge difference between "I would like [software] better if they did [idea]" vs "[software] is bad unless the devs do [idea]". Unless you're the dev, you should take some time and think about how you word that sentence!"
Events
- FrOSCon: "The #FrOSCon20 CfP is now open with the focus on: Clouds over Europe - Digital sovereignty and broken promises When the car pilot fails - risks and side effects of AI Does it Matter? - Smart Home in 2025 Retro computing - VAXination becoming cool again Reproducible publications - Open source in science Limited usability - European Accessibility Act If you would like to take part, go to https://froscon.org/cfp/cfpapers/and send us your submissions."
- tbernard: "📆 Save the Date 📆We're having another edition of #BoilingTheOcean on May 24th and 25th!Join us for two days of hacking on low-level emancipatory tech in Berlin. Agenda, location, etc. TBA :)#gnome #gtk #linuxmobile #p2p #p2panda #berlin"
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #195 Typed Weather
- tbernard: GNOME STF 2024 Project Report
- Planet GNOME: Foundry.DocumentationManager
- Phoronix: GNOME Now Has A Second Core App Written In TypeScript
Phosh
- phosh: "As part of or work on #Cellbroadcast we've documented our current test setup: https://codeberg.org/Phosh/gsm-cell-testing using #osmocom for the mobile network parts and #ansible for deploying #ModemManager on the devices, performing the tests and checking the results. Thanks to @NGIZero for supporting our work on this.#phosh #LinuxMobile"
- agx: Switching #libqmi from gtk-doc to #gidocgen makes doc generation almost 5 times faster and it's less manual work when adding new #qmi services or messages. Hopefully we can land this. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/libqmi/-/merge_requests/409#phosh #ModemManager.
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: The beginnings of Wayland session restore
- Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
- KDE Announcements: KDE Ships Frameworks 6.13.0
- Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.4 Lands Initial Support For The Wayland Session Restore Protocol
Sailfish OS
- #sailfishOS: How does using the #Jolla #JollaC2 (@jolla) with #SailfishOS for about a week as a daily driver now (with my old #iPhone at home as a backup)?
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 35
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 34
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 33
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 32
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 31
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 30
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 29
Ubuntu Touch
- jmlich: I am playing with #UbuntuTouch user metrics and #Amazfish ...I hope I don't burn my lunch ;-D https://github.com/piggz/harbour-amazfish/pull/488
- UBports - Development - Issues: Fix test failure on armhf + Qt 6
- UBports - Development - Issues: New Wallpapers (New Kaleidoscope and Ubuntu Ocean)
Distributions
- postmarketOS Blog: postmarketOS in 2025-03: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: postmarketOS in 2025-03: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n
- Lemmy.ml - linuxphones: postmarketOS: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n
- Breaking updates in pmOS edge: GTK4 apps from Flatpak/Flathub fail to start with the new GTK4 rendering backend It's not just edge, my lenovo-21bx on 24.12 is affected, too.
- pabloyoyoista: "After many months, we finally have an upstreamable path for merging /usr in postmarketOS and hence Alpine! Still lots of work to be done, I just ruined one of my test installations LOL. But it's so cool to see it become real: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/6389 #postmarketos #alpinelinux #linuxmobile"
- Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: Fix APT configuration for new sources format
- Phoronix: Fedora 42 Will Be Released Next Tuesday
Apps
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Q1/2025 Progress: Over 20 apps added and many improvements
- Dino: Dino 0.5 Release
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Lexi
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Time Switch
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: GDM Settings
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Drum Machine
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Words!
- Phoronix: Pinta 3.0 Image Editing Program Released With Port To GTK4
- daniel: Looks like Dino is enabling #OMEMO by default for the next release¹. I think that was the last of the major #XMPP clients to do so. Hopefully we can now put the "But XMPP is not encrypted by default" debate to rest.¹: https://github.com/dino/dino/commit/fc6447c56e7fdaf6f6d843a2215d870caee4aba0
- z3ntu: "Version 0.2 of my eSIM Manager app is out!We've got significant UI improvements alongside many other additions such as an app icon, providing environment variables for lpac via the command line, error handling, eUICC 'notification' handling, viewing of eUICC chip info and appstream metainfo data!https://codeberg.org/lucaweiss/lpa-gtk/releases/tag/0.2#eSIM #eUICC #LinuxMobile #MobileLinux #postmarketOS"
- mlundblad: Experimenting with showing custom icons for stations. Inspired a bit from our highway shield rendered (derived from OpenStreetMap Americana)https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-maps/-/tree/wip/mlundblad/station-iconsIt's making use of the "network:wikidata" OSM tag.Currently rendering these icons in map view itself is not tested (this needs an extra addition to our planetiler generator for the vector tiles to be run in the next import).#gnomemaps #gnome #Transit #tunnelbana #mapstodon #openstreetmap
Kernel
- phone-devel: [PATCH] arm64: dts: qcom: Remove unnecessary MM_[UD]L audio routes
- phone-devel: [PATCH v5 0/7] Input: synaptics-rmi4 - add quirks for third party touchscreen controllers
- phone-devel: [PATCH v15 0/4] Initial Marvell PXA1908 support
- Phoronix: A Fresh Take On Virtual Swap Space Being Pursued For The Linux Kernel
- Phoronix: Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading Poised For Linux 6.16 After Going Through 38 Revisions
- Phoronix: Linux 6.15 Lands Patches To Further Clean Up Its Spectre RSB Mitigations
- Phoronix: Graphics/Display Driver Changes Begin Queuing For Linux 6.16 This Summer
Stack
- Phoronix: SDL Merges Wayland Multi-Seat Support
- Phoronix: Gallium Nine Has Been Deprecated, Planned For Removal In Mesa 25.2
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-04-11
- Matrix.org: Matrix.org is now running MAS!
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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