Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (35/2025): Plasma on odd screens and Camera fun on mainline
Table of Contents
A few hours earlier than usual, the collection of past occurances: Google changing things to give #MobileLinux some market share, a podcast episode about Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen, some mainline camera fun, an introduction into Ubuntu Touch app development and more! Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- Ars Technica: Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year. Sounds fun, am I right?
- postmarketOS: postmarketOS will never ask for your ID to let users install your app!
- PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued | Hacker News Got additional interest due to this news, therefore somewhat related.
- PINE64: Project Showcase: Movuan
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Project Showcase: Movuan
- Purism: PureOS Crimson Development Report: July 2025
- fossphones.com: Linux Phone News - August 31, 2025
- Alexander Richards: OpenAGPS - Update 3: The first major roadblocks
- linuxlinks: Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Introduction to the Series
Worth Listening
- Tech Over Tea: From Plasma Mobile To Plasma Bigscreen | Devin Lin, YouTube. Nice episode! I learned a lot about Maliit!
Worth Watching
- CyberPunkEdu: A "day" in the battery life of OnePlus 6t (fajita) - OxygenOS vs Ubuntu Touch vs postmarketOS
- OS-SCi: Intro UbuntuTouch App development Course
- Libretech: Linux Phones Are REAL 👀📱🐧. No shit, Sherlock!
- 3DPrinterBlackBox: #rtlsdr gqrx test on #Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime(SM-G530H)(Samsung-fortuna3g) running #postmarketos
Worth Noting
- agx: "At #phosh @ev not everyone is a day to day cmdline #git user so I was looking for a #gui to allow committing, pulling changes etc. that is also packaged in major distributions.I rediscovered "git-gui" which might not be the prettiest but it has all the basics and on top of that you can easily add arbitrary menu entries via
.gitconfige.g.[guitool "Pull with Rebase"]cmd = git pull --rebase🎉" - cas: "As I'm finding my way back to active duty in postmarketOS, I'm yet again concluding that I just can't handle maintaining a kernel fork anymore with no upstream in sight.So this is yet another call for someone to take over rebasing and updating the SDM845 kernel. I'm happy to help deal with regressions, but I'm spending so much of my time lately working on tooling and U-Boot, something has to give and that has been the kernel maintenance.Joel has done a great job at helping out (and hopefully will continue to do so!) but we're lacking someone to deal with regular updates, get all the devices tested, etc...If this is something you're interested in and you have some relevant experience please let me know! so many folks are relying on SDM845 devices for their Linux Mobile use or development, so providing some kind of relatively stable platform is pretty important...Not looking for any xz style maintainers, thanks!#postmarketOS #linuxmobile #oneplus6 #maintainer #linux #burnout"
- tbernard: "Part 3 of the GNOME Shell gestures work by @verdre has landed in Mutter/GNOME Shell main. This is one of the main dependencies for upstreaming the rest of GNOME Shell mobile 🙌Huge thanks to everyone involved in review, especially @fmuellner, Carlos Garnacho, @jadahl, Bilal Elmoussaoui, @rmader, and @swick!https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2857https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2853"
- Logical_Error: "would people be interested in buying devices directly from #postmarketOS or having pmOS pre flashed by OEMs? there are a couple organizational issues publicly available: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/operations/-/issuespmOS is reaching out to OEMs, but i wonder if people would also be open to buying slightly older devices that are pre flashed. are there any entities that can help mainline a device if paid?everything is up in the air, but there is interest within pmOSthoughts?"
- Drew Naylor: I am once again asking for a FOSS implementation of Wi-Fi Calling that is allowed by carriers for anyone who doesn't have good cell service but can't get a femtocell because it's not offered anymore by their carrier.#Android #LinuxMobile #LinuxPhones
- fell: The fact that Google may be ending sideloading apps on Android forever is another reason we should donate more to @postmarketOS With 1-2 more years of work, it could reach a state similar to Desktop Linux or Android ROMs, where everything works, at least on a good number of devices.Can't donate? That's okay. What they really need is contributors anyways. Together, we can beat Google!#Google #Android #Sideloading #Linux #postmarketOS #MobileLinux
- praveen: Making PipeWire’s PulseAudio server implementation handle filter.want and filter.apply properties will makeecho cancellation working on the Librem 5 phone with #pipewire https://forums.puri.sm/t/mobian-on-librem-5/21733/128 We have currently 160 USD bounty on this task https://opencollective.com/dephcom/projects/pipewire-echo Interested to try and implement this? Or would you like to add to the bounty to encourage someone to fix this sooner? #mobian #mobilegnulinux #debian #FreeSoftware
Mainline Camera Fun
- NekoCWD: "🐱 Meow!I'm not so good in archery, but at least my WIP #libcamera patches for autofocus works great :DLet's make some promo of itShot with EyeNeko camera app on OnePlus 6 (oneplus-enchilada) running @postmarketOS@social.treehouse.systems#ShotOnMainline #linuxonmobile "
- @dos@librem.one: To pass some time in a train yesterday, I've copy'n'pasted my recent GPU ISP into Millipixels' postprocessing code to see how it compares with what was already there. Before/after:#mobilelinux #linuxmobile #librem5 #shotonlibrem5 … There are still some crucial things missing, such as profiled denoising or proper highlight recovery, but since the performance budget for a still photo is much higher than for a 30 FPS video, there's plenty of room to add more stuff - and most of these 2 seconds are spent reading DNG and saving JPG anyway.#mobilelinux #linuxmobile #librem5 #shotonlibrem5
Events
- planet.kde.org: "Akademy Time is Itinerary Time blog.broulik.de/2025/08/akademy-time-is-itinerary-time Every year the KDE Community conducts a large-scale field-test of KDE Itinerary, their fantastic travel companion app, disguised as annual community conference. This year’s Akademy takes place in the capital of Germany, Berlin. I have decided to try and…". Quite likely see you next week-end at Akademy!
- Phosh.mobi e.V.: Am 27. September sind wir auf dem #LinuxDay #Vorarlberg mit einem Stand. Kommt vorbei! https://www.linuxday.at/aussteller/2025#LinuxMobile #Phosh
Meaningful Jobs
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #214 Managing Tasks
- Allan Day: Thanks and farewell to Steven Deobald
- Steven Deobald: So short, and thanks for all the flinch. I'll defintely miss the Updates on work done at the Foundation. Transparency matters and helps understanding. Thanks, Steven, for all your work!
- Pablo Correa Gomez: Retrospective of my term as a Director for the GNOME Foundation. Thanks for your efforts, Pablo!
- Phoronix: GTK 4.20 Released With Better Wayland Support, Rendering Enhancements
Phosh
- Phosh.mobi e.V. News: Linuxday Dornbirn 2025
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Saved clipboard items and tablet touch rings
- Volker Krause: Computing simplified coverage polygons
- Shubham's Blog: My GSoC 2025 Journey - Part 2
- broulik: Akademy Time is Itinerary Time
- Jonah Brüchert: Improving the experience with public Wi-Fi hotspots
- sebas' blog: Back in Action on Plasma (Mobile)
- kenoi: GSoC 2025 Final Project Blog: Developing Karton, the KDE Virtual Machine Manager!
- Pablo Ariño Muñoz: Weeks 7-13 on Merkuro (GSoC 2025)
- Phoronix: KDE Addresses A 22 Year Old Feature Request For Its Clipboard
- kde: "KDE's yearly report for 2024 is out!Read about what we did, the projects we started, the events we visited, how much money we raised 💶, where we spent your donation, and everything else that went on within the Community 📈 during the past year.https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2024/#report #transparency #opensource #linux@kde@lemmy.kde.social"
- kde: "We've been working on improving On-Screen Keyboard support in computers, mobile devices and TVs as part of the We Care About Your Input - KDE Goals initiative.Check out what has been done so far in Plasma Virtual Keyboard and tell us what you'd like to see next. 💻️📱📺️https://discuss.kde.org/t/plasma-virtual-keyboard-feedback-needed/39008#kde #linux #accessibility #kdegoals #osk #virtualkeyboard #wayland@kde@lemmy.kde.social"
Sailfish OS
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 152
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 151
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 150
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 149
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 148
Ubuntu Touch
- OS-SCi: Intro UbuntuTouch App development Course
- fredldotme: It still baffles me how performant the whole Aethercast experience is. Now with compression ratio configurability I managed to get good quality out of the H264 OMX machinery. Still doesn't noticeably drain CPU or wastes resources.This screenshot is the phone on idle.
- linuxlinks: Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Introduction to the Series
Distributions
- postmarketOS: BREAKING: postmarketOS finally enters the 2020'sit's /usr merge time! Come check it out :3https://postmarketos.org/edge/2025/07/27/usr-merge-testing/
- postmarketOS (Mastodon): . @fizzo and @corna have been getting their hands dirty validating the battery emulation in our upcoming device harness PCB.The next step is to write some proper firmware for the board to emulate the existing control mechanism of the Qualcomm debug board used by CDBA (https://github.com/linux-msm/cdba) and provide additional functionality for controlling the buttons and reading stats like power consumption.This hardware will enable us to automatically test changes to postmarketOS before they ship. It will also allow device maintainers to automatically boot test new kernels and perform automated self-tests, and it will lay the foundation for future testing of power consumption, modem functionality and much much more once this becomes widely available.For more details check out our last status update: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/05/13/hw-ci-status/We hope to make this hardware available for the developers not just in our community but the wider Linux Mobile ecosystem, to set up their own device farms so we can test more software on more devices!The PCB itself is open source, but we plan to produce pre-assembled units for the community.
- ncopa: We are simplifying the Alpine developer onboarding process.https://alpinelinux.org/posts/2025-08-30-new-alpine-developers-process.html#AlpineLinux #FOSS #maintainers
Apps
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Gauge
- afranke: "Fixing a regression with unauthenticated media endpoints, here’s #Fractal 12.1 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/fractal-12-1-released/31092#matrix #GNOME"
- One Open-source Project Daily Connect, control and sync devices https://github.com/andyholmes/valent #1ospd #opensource #gtk4 #kdeconnect #librem5 #phosh #pinephone
- krille: 🥳 Release time!#FluffyChat v2.1 has been released (already with a patch version v2.1.1) which brings support for Room version 12 and other bug fixes and performance improvements.#matrix
- tpikonen: "Version 2.8.0 of Geoclue, the freedesktop.org location service was just released! The release highlights are #beacondb support and a separate GeoIP source with new backends. Coming to a #linux computer near you.https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/geoclue/geoclue/-/releases/2.8.0#geoclue #freedesktop #geolocation"
- seshpenguin: Come help test KRetro, a libretro frontend for KDE! It's still basic, but functional now!The easiest way is with the nightly flatpak (it has cores built in), just "flatpak install https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/kretro-nightly/org.kde.kretro.flatpakref"Or, compile it with kde-builder (see https://invent.kde.org/games/kretro).All you need to do is put ROMs (supported consoles currently are GBA, NES, SNES, SMS, and Genesis/MD) in ~/Documents/Games.KRetro also works on Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen!#kde #mobilelinux #gaming #retrogaming
- prashere: "Here is what is missing in the popular #OSM based #FOSS apps (#OsmAnd, @CoMaps & @organicmaps) from being a potential replacement for GMaps.1. Photos & Reviews are two most important things that are missing right now. @mangroveReviews and @lib_reviews are here to fill the reviews gap. #WikimediaCommons, @panoramax are here to fill the photos gap.2. Crowdsourced Real time Traffic data. I couldn't find any #opendata platform yet. Though I saw an empty repo created under the CoMaps project. 🤞"
Kernel
- phone-devel: [PATCH v7 0/6] Initial support of MSM8937 and Xiaomi Redmi 3S
- phone-devel: [PATCH] arch: arm64: dts: qcom: sdm845-shift-axolotl: set chassis type
- phone-devel: [PATCH] drm/panel: visionox-rm69299: Fix clock frequency for SHIFT6mq
- Phoronix: Qualcomm Packet Processing Engine "PPE" Going Upstream For Linux 6.18
- Phoronix: Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra Device Trees Under Review For The Linux Kernel
- Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Marks Bcachefs As Now "Externally Maintained"
- Phoronix: VESA DRM Driver Ready With 8-Bit Color Palette Mode For Linux 6.18
Stack
- Phoronix: Wayfire 0.10 Wayland Compositor Brings Experimental Vulkan Rendering
- Phoronix: Mesa's LLVMpipe Driver Adds Support For 8x MSAA
- Phoronix: Mesa 25.1.9 Released To End Out The Mesa 25.1 Series
- Phoronix: GTK 4.20 Released With Better Wayland Support, Rendering Enhancements
- Phoronix: Fwupd 2.0.14 Brings New Framework & SteelSeries Hardware Support
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-08-29
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!