Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (36/2025): Past and Present
Table of Contents
The past week, masked as a link list: One more core Sailfish app being open-sourced, postmarketOS asking for feedback on upstream first development, iOS 14 in QEMU on a Linux phone, help find and fix Lomiri bugs, and ... nothing about KDE Akademy, yet. Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- Mobian's Blog: A Summer with Mobian: The Story of Tweakster (GSoC '25)
- LinuxLinks: Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Pre-installed apps
- Masked Witch: "Some people on activitypub seemed a bit interested in mobile linux…". Nice PinePhone review!
Worth Watching
- UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 173. Nice one! Aside from 24.04 progress, it's nice to see new apps landing!
- Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E485: SFOS – Plants
- History of Gadgets: MeeGo - Nokia's forgotten OS. That Elop... didn't quite work out. (And neither did my old post stand the test of time.)
- Cards By The Hill: YES! The Pinephone 64 WILL work with an Alfa Adapter!. Not surprised ;-)
- ArToSeVeN: Nokia N900 with Maemo OS
- Nostalgitech: PostmarketOS with Gnome Mobile UI Demo
- Anonymous Creator: Installing Ubuntu Touch !!! #hack #hacker #hacking #cybersecurity #os #linux #anonymous #ubuntu
- Ajarn Spencer: Chuwi Minibook X & Ubuntu Linux Touch Screen Rotation solved. There's honestly zero reason to include this, it's just that I like tiny laptops!
Worth Noting
- pi_crew: "Finally iOS 14 running on #postmarketOS Linux phone, emulated with QEMU 🥳Here's the project site by CheffKissInc group https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon#LinuxMobile"
- farooqkz: "Hey. If you've got a #Kobo #ebookreader, I will appreciate if you could extract some information from your device. #mainlining #pmOS #LinuxMobile" Do help, please!
- austriancoder: "Summer vacation’s been over for a bit, and I finally found time to start merging some of my open MRs.#etnaviv #mesa3d #librem5 #mntreform"
- sunweaver: #Lomiri Operating Environment - help us fixing bugs and claim your #bounty: https://os-sci.com/lomiri
- erebion: "btw, I've played with OpenStore support from FuriLabs and got it running on Mobian: https://git.erebion.eu/forgejo/erebion/furios-openstore-support-mobian#LinuxOnMobile"
- PinePhoneOfficial (Reddit): Updating Default OS Viable?. LOL, no. (It's sad.)
- badrihippo: "This day in history...I mean present: first ever end-to-end encrypted message to be sent from a #dumbphone?https://git.disroot.org/badrihippo/convo/commit/c95d048c9dafa51ceef5c5c07b241abe6290696bUsing #Convo on #KaiOS, powered by #ConverseJS, #XMPP, #OMEMO, and #libsignal :xmpp:"
- Poll from Bits inside by René Rebe - YouTube. Unfortunately, I am not a twitch subscriber, so no idea about further details.
- c/Linux: The state of Linux phones in 2025
Akademy
- VolkerKrause: "First day of #KDE #Akademy2025! Later today I'll talk about our work on @foss_public_alert_server and bringing emergency and weather alerts to Plasma (Mobile), 18:15 CEST in room 1 - https://conf.kde.org/event/9/contributions/272/"
- seshpenguin: Pixel 3a with Plasma Mobile ready for #akademy in Berlin (with @espidev )The Vodafone employee was only slightly confused setting up the SIM on Plasma Mobile and looked somewhat concerned when I rebooted the phone and the tty scrolled by 😄. My short stint at Akademy was awesome, btw.
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #215 Turn On
- Allan Day: Foundation Update, 2025-09-05 Nice to see 'Foundation Updates' continue beyond the recent departure.
- Aryan Kaushik: GNOME Outreachy Dec 2025 Cohort
- Christian Hergert: Asynchronous IO with Libdex
- Ahmed Fatthi: GSoC 2025 Final Report: Backend Isolation Prototype for GNOME Papers
- vtrlx: "Version 0.10.1 of #LuaGObject is now out.This version brings improved support for #Adwaita and #GTK 4. It is now possible to add child widgets directly in constructors, allowing you to build complex widget trees directly from Lua code—no UI files or blueprints necessary!Get it on LuaRocks ⇒ https://luarocks.org/modules/vtrlx/luagobjectSource code ⇒ https://github.com/vtrlx/LuaGObject"
Phosh
- phosh: Which additional quick settings do you enable in #Phosh?Boosts appreciated to get more data.#LinuxMobile
- agx: My #FreeSoftware Activities for August 2025: https://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/Free_Software_Activities_August_2025.html🙏 to everyone supporting this!#phosh #Debian #LinuxMobile
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: more app permission configuration; pre-Akademy edition!
- Nate Graham: Announcing the Alpha release of KDE Linux
- Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.5 KWin Adding Support For GPU Underlays
Sxmo
- #sxmo: Ever had a hard time to setup the correct APN settings on your #sxmo #pmos driven #linuxmobile ?not anymore, there is an Apn Helper in #sxmop6 to help you finding the correct settings.
- @pocketvj@fosstodon.org: bored of the regular internet?checkout the #geminiprotocol... since today we have a fully featured browser with cert support which runs smooth on #linuxmobile #pmos git clone https://github.com/mochaman/alhena.gitcd alhenamvn clean installjava -jar target/lib/alhena.jarIn Settings, enable "Drag to Scroll" and adjust the font size to fit a full page on your screen. #LinuxPhoneApps Speaking of Gemini: Geopard saw another release lately, fixing an issue with current GTK that had been previously at least ruined the experience with distro packages.
Sailfish OS
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 4th September 2025 - Open sourcing proceeding
- jolla: "Open sourcing Sailfish OS proceeds, and Sailfish Weather is now open sourcedMore apps coming soon, camera might be next 👀Details & discussion: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/open-sourcing-proceeding/24689#Jolla #SailfishOS #OpenSource"
- adampigg: #SailfishOS on the @pine64 #pinephone and #pinephone has had a boost to kernel 6.16.1 and Mesa 25.2.1. PT2 will follow.
Ubuntu Touch
- UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 173. Nice one! Aside from 24.04 progress, it's nice to see new apps landing!
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 173 call for questions
- UBports - Development - Issues: Apps that only support primary orientation doesn't work properly on tablets
Distributions
- Mobian's Blog: A Summer with Mobian: The Story of Tweakster (GSoC '25)
- postmarketOS Blog: The CoC Team are here
- Breaking updates in pmOS edge: Unreliable audio due to wireplumber 0.5.11 and callaudiod
- postmarketOS (Mastodon): How did you learn about postmarketOS?(please boost for reach)#LinuxMobilesearching for custom ROMsBlog post/news articleFediWord of mouthKernel mailing listReddit/hackernews
- postmarketOS (Mastodon): our community have always tried to embrace the upstream-first approach to development, and one of the largest roadblocks in that respect is often the Linux Kernel itself.For better or worse it takes quite a lot of effort to get devicetree files and drivers upstreamed, but this is by far one of the more important goals for wider Linux Mobile adoption: upstream support makes devices more visible and encourages kernel maintainers to take more of an interest in the work we dowith that in mind, we are proposing an adjustment to the community device category requirements: to get your device into the community category it would now HAVE to have a devicetree in upstream, more specifically the upstream kernel needs to boot with some kind of display output and a working USB port - the bare minimum for easy tinkering, testing, and further development.We hope that this will encourage device maintainers to get involved in upstream kernel development and submit their work rather than keeping everything in a kernel fork that they maintainWe are very open to feedback on this, please let us know what you think in the GitLab issuehttps://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/postmarketos/-/issues/116#LinuxMobile #postmarketOS #linux #kernel
- postmarketOS pmaports issues: For mobile phones that have been running this system for a long time, if the battery is removed and the power is supplied directly, the power will still slow...
- Phoronix: Debian 13.1 Released With An Initial Batch Of Fixes
Apps
- postmarketOS: Apps by Category: Magmaus3: /* Other protocols */ add signal-desktop, the official desktop client for signal. it's usable on mobile, but could require a few patches to make it more usable. The interesting bit: signal-desktop is now in testing (Alpine edge, and thus postmarketOS edge). Regarding tweaks for mobile: AFAIK, Droidian do some work in that direction.
- linuxphoneapps: "We actually managed to break https://linuxphoneapps.org/find/apps/ with a larger unrelated change in the past few days.So if you've been missing it, don't worry - it's been fixed and works again.". I've landed some improvements since, more to come (hopefully, if time allows).
Kernel
- phone-devel: [PATCH v2 0/3] drm/panel: visionox-rm69299: Add backlight support and small fixes Shift 6mq.
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 0/3] Marvell 88PM886 PMIC GPADC driver
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 0/7] Various dt-bindings for Milos and The Fairphone (Gen. 6) addition
- phone-devel: [PATCH v4 2/2] remoteproc: qcom: pas: Add Milos remoteproc support
Stack
- Phoronix: Firefox Ending 32-bit Linux Support Next Year
- Phoronix: Rust Coreutils 0.2 Released With "Massive" Performance Gains, Production-Ready Ubuntu Support
- Phoronix: systemd 258 Closing In On Its Stable Release
- Phoronix: Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 Released For Security Vulnerability Exploit Detection
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-09-05
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!