Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (33/2025): RIP Pro, yay wireplumber!
Table of Contents
PINE64 have discontinued the PinePhone Pro, postmarketOS share details about a project to replace callaudiod with a wireplumber plugin (call audio issues be gone!), Phosh 0.49.0 (actually, Stevia 0.49.0) relieves me of hand pain, KDE Gear 25.08 bringing fresh new features to Plasma apps during summer heat, more progress on the NewPipe app for SailfishOS, some link to FrOSCon slides + a talk recording and more. Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- postmarketOS Blog: New financed postmarketOS project: wireplumber and callaudiod
- PINE64: August Update: Note-able Tablet Updates
- PINE64: A Quick Community Update on PinePhone Pro and What’s Next. Sad news, despite all the issues with the PinePhone Pro. IMHO, they killed the wrong phone. If I believed publishing long rants to be a productive thing that help mankind, I would publish a dedicated blog post to lay out my thoughts further (I don't).
- Encrypt user home directory with gocryptfs | Bacardi55's Web Cave
Worth Watching
- FrOSCon e.V.: 2025 - postmarketOS - Digital Independence in Your Pocket, also on media.ccc.de
- korek644: Ubuntu Touch na tablecie!
- Nostalgitech: FuriPhone FLX1 - Linux Mobile 5G
- The Linux Cast: Will Linux Ever Be Good on Phones? - LUG
- Michael Tunnell: "Secure Boot Linux issues, EU's Chat Control law, Linux Mint 22.2, Ubuntu Touch, & more Linux news"
Worth Noting
- bradlinder: An early look at desktop Linux apps including Chromium and GIMP running on a Google Pixel 8 Pro using the latest version of Google's Terminal app for Android. Pixel 6 or later on Android's Canary channel should work too. https://www.androidauthority.com/run-desktop-linux-apps-on-android-how-to-3586539/
- kde: Congratulations @gnome on your 28th anniversary!🎂🥳@kde@lemmy.kde.social
- tbernard: "Some photos from last week's #BoilingTheOcean 6 at @101lab (thanks @ben4climate!), which was a lot of fun ✨Some highlights:- @frankrausch talked about the course on GNOME app design he gave last semester at FH Potsdam- @glyph presented the brand-new @p2panda access controls API- @larma did an initial port of @dino to Android- @matzipan got @postmarketOS running on the MNT Reform- @verdre worked on the new gestures in mutter (pre-requisite for upstreaming Mobile Shell)"
- Purism community: July 2025 Crimson development blog will be late
- Purism community: The Librem 5 BLOB List
FrOSCon
- agx: "The first talk in this years #FossOnMobile devroom at @FrOSCon was by @1peter10 titled"Which Phone to get to run Mobile Linux on?"As you can see in the picture easy photo taking can be one of them.There was some lively discussion about options, Android containers (especially around #bluetooth for attaching devices).". No recording, talk slides.
- agx: There were then 3️⃣ 🌩️ -talks:- Christoph presented Discitat for tracking students scores (https://codeberg.org/Lerothas/Discitat). He's seeking help with making it mobile friendly and getting it onto #flathub.- Alex showed the status of VR-Headsets like the Lynxr1 (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lynx_R1_(lynx-r1)) with @postmarketos- @affe_null demoed the status of his Jolla C2 mainlining. The device uses an UNISOC soc and It booted up into @postmarketos with @phosh . He can also run #sailfishos on it using the same kernel.. Seeing mainline on the C2 was soo impressive. Really great work!
- @linmob@linuxmobile.social: @linmob@linuxmobile.social posted [2] attachments: "Some visuals from #FrOSCon, shot on #oneplus6 with EyeNeko" Remaining links for day 2 will be shared in the next weekly update (or a post in between, if time allows.
- leandrofriedrich: "just a bunch of silly little mobile computers at the FOSS-Phone Groupphoto Session @FrOSCon, most running @postmarketOS #froscon #froscon20 #froscon2025 #postmarketos #sailfishos #mobian #foss #linux #linuxmobile #android"
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #212 Happy Birthday!
- Sebastian Wick: Display Next Hackfest 2025
- Phoronix: GNOME 49 Beta Ships Many Last Minute Features - Including Greater systemd Reliance
Phosh
- Phosh.mobi: Phosh 0.49.0
- Phosh (gotosocial): "phosh 0.49.0 is out 🚀📱: We have some new features, quality of life improvements, under the hood work and 🐛 fixes, check out the full release notes at https://phosh.mobi/releases/rel-0.49.0/ for details or see ...
- #phosh: Quick demo at #WHY2025: The Fairphone 5 connected to Nreal AR glasses with Phosh and postmarketOS!Together with @matthewcroughan at the NixOS tent, he's also trying to get them working with Monado!#Phosh #postmarketOS #MobileLinux #LinuxMobile #NixOS
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: a lot of polishing!
- KDE Announcements: KDE 🌞 Gear 25.08
- Volker Krause: Getting ready for Akademy 2025
- Phoronix: KDE Breeze Drops Colorful Third-Party App Icons, Plasma Adds Plug-In Device Notification
Sxmo
- #sxmo: #linuxmobile pair programming on #sxmo....with #nerd #dogs
- #sxmo: get the actual weather, tomorrow and the day after in #sxmo #linuxmobile with this fancy script:https://codeberg.org/magdesign/sxmop6/src/branch/main/bin/sxmo_weather.sh
Sailfish OS
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 139
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 138
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 137
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 136
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 135
- #sailfishOS: Now it's slow mode 💤 time.But all the orders before the 15th are covered and will be sent out during the next week.The J-D Store will be back in September with a new Service and a new Item.#xperia #sailfishos
- #sailfishOS: @thelinuxcast Nobody even mentioning #SailfishOS, a good mobile Linux made by @jolla, which ticks so many of the mentioned "it's not there yet" boxes:- well-integrated #Android subsystem (e.g install from #Fdroid or #AuroraStore)- a battle-tested UI (that one is proprietary though)- installable on very cheap phones- ...I really should've joined and talked about it. And since you mentioned it: Yes, I do in fact use the #nix package manager on it 😉
Ubuntu Touch
- fredldotme: Don't mind me, just toying around with Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 in desktop mode
- UBports - Development - Issues: On non-hybris device, libhybris crashes inside
eglGetDisplay("EGL_DEFAULT_DISPLAY") - UBports - Development - Issues: Tracking issue for major release: 24.04-1.0
Distributions
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: Is anyone doing anything with Moto Kiev?
- postmarketOS Blog: New financed postmarketOS project: wireplumber and callaudiod
- craftyguy: "(1/2)I'm basically at the point where I can offer immutable images of #postmarketOS for folks to play with... is anyone interested?These aren't anything you want to depend on for anything important, and stuff will definitely break. To play along, you need a device that can EFI boot[1].1. Android devices that can EFI boot still need additional work, so I'm not supporting them yet..." "(2/2)If folks are interested I can generate images for x86_64 laptops/tablets, the Thinkpad X13s, Pinephone Pro... anything else?For UIs, I've tested GNOME (desktop), COSMIC, and Plasma Mobile[1].Let me know which device + UI you'd like to see and I'll see what I can do.1. There's a bug somewhere with plamo and the way we handle login or something that I haven't been able to figure out yet (help appreciated!)"
- postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: MNT Reform 2
- Mobian mobian-recipes Issues: Please consider installing
Recommendsby default for forky - Mobian Wiki: Mobian
- Phoronix: Ubuntu 25.10 Continues Preparing For RISC-V RVA23 Baseline Requirement. OT, but despite me always being against abandoning hardware, a popular distro enforcing a sane baseline (which RVA23 seems to be) sound like a really good thing to me!
Apps
- Phoronix: KDE Gear 25.08 Released With Improvements For Many KDE Apps
- alice: "A few changes this week.Highscore now depends on libadwaita 1.8.rc (GNOME 49 is getting released fairly soon, so might as well), and so uses AdwShortcutsDialog, new pref group API and CSS media queries. The dialog is still barebones, I just ported it to the new widget (and blueprint, since it's not deprecated so won't spam warnings like GtkShortcutsWindow)A few fixes to the TV filter, as usual - in particular, PAL games don't have jailbars anymoreSlight tweaks to the video preferences page - to hide LCD color correction modes into an expander rowFinally, I added (basically placeholder atm) help setup - more or less copied from Loupe. Also yes, Yelp has been finally ported to GTK4"
- Phoronix: GNOME Disks Continues Being Ported To Rust
- nheko (Matrix): v0.12.1
- linuxphoneapps: "Today Peter held a talk titled:"Linux Phone Apps in 2025: Highlights and Room for improvement"There's no recording, but here are the slides:https://linuxphoneapps.org/media/froscon2025-slides.pdfEnjoy!"
- linuxphoneapps: "If you want help collecting some Gaps in the Linux Phone App Ecosystem, please contribute to this pad:https://pad.hacc.space/XP5opplBQ3mWEpAcv47oSg#(It's part of this #FrOSCon #FOSSonMobile Talk: https://programm.froscon.org/froscon2025/talk/0a60d401-814a-473d-af0c-5d6ac5913065/ (which won't be recorded, sadly).#LinuxMobile". The talk is done, but feel free to chime in!
Kernel
- phone-devel: Re: (subset) [PATCH 0/3] Remove double colon from description in dt-bindings
- phone-devel: [PATCH RESEND v4 0/3] Add initial device tree for Billion Capture+
- Phoronix: Patches Posted For Raspberry Pi 5 Ethernet With The Upstream Linux Kernel
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-08-15
- Matrix.org: Project Hydra: Improving state resolution in Matrix
- Matrix.org: Security Release
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!