Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (19/2025): Waking it up to wake you up
Table of Contents
Librem 5 (and other devices) gain suspend wakeup for alarms, Ubuntu Touch adds Fairphone 5 official support, postmarketOS launches a new contribution guide, progress on the SailfishOS NewPipe-app, phosh-osk-stub character popups and more.
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- Digital Sober: G-Shock watch integration with SXMO
- Luigi311: Widevine on Mobile/ARM Linux
- Drew DeVaults blog: The British Airways position on various border disputes
- postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Porting to a new device
- Purism: What Is PureOS? A Beginner’s Guide for iOS, Android, and Windows Users
- grimmwa.re/blog/html/00019-environment.html
Worth Watching
- devrtz: A look at Mobian Trixie, talk page. Great talk!
- Alexander The Tech Guy: Running PostmarketOS on a PinePhone Pro in 2025!
- Alexander The Tech Guy: I Got My Hands on a PinePhone Pro!
- Alexander The Tech Guy: Trying and Installing Ubuntu Touch in 2025!
Worth Noting
- jbz: "🇺🇸 How a $2,000 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured ｢ It’s the Liberty Phone, which is made by a company called Purism. The phone is a version of Purism’s Librem 5. The Made-in-China Librem 5 costs $800, and the Liberty phone costs $2,000. It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated ｣ https://www.404media.co/how-a-2-000-made-in-the-usa-liberty-phone-phone-is-manufactured/#purism #tariffs #librem5". Interview / podcast, missed this when it was new!
- mntmn: we've released linux 6.14 for all mnt reform series platforms today.
- praveen: Thanks to awesome work by @agx #Librem5 can now wake up from suspend when alarm is set! This is a huge leap in usability.This was top 3 item in #dephcom feature priority poll for mobile GNU/Linux.https://codema.in/d/9PSaLqK8/first-feature-prioritizing-pollIt is available from https://phosh.mobi/posts/phosh-nightly/ and https://people.debian.org/~praveen/mobian/ and hopefully will hit official channels soon.You likely need to also run sudo setcap 'cap_wake_alarm=ep' /usr/bin/gnome-clocks#mobian #debian #FreeSoftware #gnulinuxmobile
- pabloyoyoista: "I've had a few days with my head full of governance stuff, and I want to publish and comment on a small section of something that I've written:One big lesson I've learned being a child of an affective psychologist is that, in human groups, feelings matter. They matter so much, that often, they completely overshadow facts. But emotions and facts are managed differently. Communication (and lack thereof) about facts impact feelings. People's experiences also impact feelings. Different people will feel differently about the same facts. /1"
- hnygd: "In case you missed it: @tobykurien now has figured out how to use the #PinephonePro headphone to USB serial adapter for #FreeBSD network access until real network support is working, see README at https://codeberg.org/Honeyguide/freebsd-pinephonepro/src/branch/main/README.md"
- dos: "So yesterday I saw a @postmarketOS toot about their web flasher for Android devices, and I thought - how hard would it be to make one for L5? Turns out - not hard at all. Here it is booting Jumpdrive.Some caveats:- requires permission setting on Linux 😔 I may work out-of-box on other platforms though- it's sloooow, but there's hope: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1271- asks 5 times to allow access to the device. Could go down to 3, but no less than that.#librem5 #linuxmobile #mobilelinux #nxp #imx"
- @dos@librem.one: 👀 #librem5 #linuxmobile #mobilelinux #nxp #imx
- @linmob@fosstodon.org: I have a Lumbago, so in all likelihood, I won't be able to publish another installment of the "Weekly #MobileLinux Update" tonight. Sorry about that! #LinuxMobile Just in case anyone wonders why this post is a bit late - thanks for all the kind replies!
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #199 One More Week...
- Felipe Borges: GNOME Welcomes Its Google Summer of Code 2025 Contributors!
- Phoronix: GNOME Showtime Accepted As Video Player App For GNOME 49
Phosh
- Phosh.mobi blog: On Screen Keyboard Text Correction and Completion
- phosh: Dear distro maintainers and "i build my own stuff" people: In case you want to check out 0.47 relesase upfront: we've tagged the first releases candidates (0.47~rc1) of #phosh and related components 🎉 Release is planned 2025-05-18 (https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/wikis/Releases)We've also tagged the companion releases for #gmobile 0.3.0 and #feedbackd 0.8.2 / feedbackd-device-themes 0.8.3 already.
- fossdd: @phosh postmarketOS users can try the release candidate out with
mrtest upgrade -a 84018🎉(https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/84018) - agx: @fossdd @phosh Nice 🎉 #Debian / #Mobian users can pull the posh release candidate packages from the
experimentalsuite (https://wiki.debian.org/DebianExperimental)
- fossdd: @phosh postmarketOS users can try the release candidate out with
- agx: "With the alarm clock waking the phone from suspend we still need to make sure the alarm sound is audible. We thus need it to have a volume level separate from e.g. media, notifications, calls, etc. This is possible with #wireplumber's "role based policy". There's a lot of lose ends to fix before this all can land but here's a quick demo in #phosh (the alarm sound your is played via #feedbackd which adds the necessary role):#LinuxMobile"
- agx: ·..and here's how the volume controls currently look in mobile settings. We get the list of controls from #wireplumber too and#phosh's volume slider gets the highest priority volume so the top panel's volume slider does "the right thing" by default. (I've linked the related MRs from https://gitlab.gnome.org/guidog/meta-phosh/-/issues/20)
- agx: Hopefully a small (optional) popup indicating the just typed character in #phosh-osk-stub will help me reduce typos even more.Wanted to add this since ages but I deemed my GTK foo not good enough to have the popover ignore any input and be always properly placed but seems it worked out.Video is a 2️⃣ times speed.
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: inhibit sleep while transferring files
- Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
- KDE Announcements: KDE Ships Frameworks 6.14.0
- KDE Announcements: KDE Gear 25.04.1
- KDE Announcements: KDE Plasma 6.3.5, Bugfix Release for May
- KDE Mentorship: KDE & Google Summer of Code 2025
- KDE Mentorship: Season Of KDE 2025 Conclusion
- Felix Ernst: How to Not Pay German Taxes for Free Software Development Funded by the European Commission
Sxmo
Sailfish OS
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 64
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 63
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 62
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 61
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 60
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 59
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 58
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 57
- #sailfishOS: [BLOG] Wireguard on #SailfishOS: where's the configuration file saved? - https://www.ncartron.org/wireguard-on-sailfish-os-wheres-the-configuration-file-saved.html
Ubuntu Touch
Distributions
- postmarketOS: "Do you want to get involved in postmarketOS but don't know where to start? Check out our new contribute page! We are not only interested in people who want to play around with APKBUILDs and hacking on the Linux kernel, but also have plenty of things in there that don't require programming knowledge such as becoming part of the Testing Team, reporting issues, writing documentation and just helping out other people! ✨https://postmarketos.org/contribute/"
- postmarketOS: "So this is our new Mastodon account. Due to amazing Fediverse magic most of the followers were moved over just a few minutes later, wow! If it didn't happen for you yet, you can also manually click the follow button here. Thanks to #Treehouse for hosting our account from now on! ❤️"
- postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Porting to a new device
- Breaking updates in pmOS edge: Cross compiler related issues
- Breaking updates in pmOS edge: Graphical issue with Mesa 25 on Mediatek SoCs
- postmarketOS pmaports issues: Arcan port - libglvnd
- postmarketOS pmaports issues: [v24.12] [phosh] Dillo browser : usage of SSL websites disables the onscreen keyboard effects
- postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: OnePlus Ace 3 (oneplus-aston)
Apps
- sunweaver: "#Debian 13 (aka #trixie) looks like it won't have the #Telegram desktop client as was previously shipped in Debian 11 and Debian 12. Luckily, there is an alternative: #TELEports from the #Lomiri project. I tested it in #MATE and #i3 and it works nicely."
- nekohayo: "We are pleased to inform #GNOMECalendar users that the weird "week / agenda views scrolling up by themselves when clicking" heisenbug, which has been puzzling us for the last 2.5 years, has been vanquished by @TheEvilSkeleton through their fabulous #accessibility / #a11y work lately. You can already benefit from this while running the #GNOME nightly flatpak version of the Calendar app.https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/issues/915"
- chergert: Just landed a redesign of D-Spy for GNOME 49. Quick shout-out to @alice for helping me figure out how to make the whole three-column thing work.Should work on GNOME mobile shell now too.
Kernel
- Phoronix: Few Apple Silicon Device Tree Updates Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.16
- phone-devel: [PATCH] media: i2c: ov8858: Add sensor's pixel matrix size
- phone-devel: [PATCH 0/4] Moto G (2013) DTS updates
- phone-devel: [PATCH v4 0/5] Add DisplayPort sound support for Fairphone 5 smartphone
- phone-devel: Re: [PATCH 0/4] Add *_wait_val values for GDSCs in all SM6350 clock drivers
- Phoronix: The Linux Kernel Dropping Its Unused Built-In Software Echo Cancellation Code
Stack
- Phoronix: Servo Browser Engine Now Rendering Gmail & Google Chat, Decides Against AI Contributions
- Phoronix: Mesa's Lavapipe Driver Wires Up More Features Used By VKD3D-Proton
- Phoronix: Hyprland 0.49 Wayland Compositor Working On Permission Management & New Protocols
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-05-09
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 the hedgedoc 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!
If you can imagine to put this collection together (it's mostly deleting irrelevant stuff, after scripts have collected it), please get in touch via email (see below)! It would really help to have someone else taking on the responsibility for this collection every once in a while!