Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (42/2025): Mobian Trixie
Table of Contents
This past week: Mobian Trixie got released, a nice UBports Q&A and some Sailfish OS Community News. Also, it's now a lot more clear what the FSF librephone initiative is about (thankfully it is not another AOSP distribution), a PureOS Crimson progress report and more. Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- Mobian Blog: A new Stable, and rotating keys
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: A new Stable, and rotating keys
- Neil Brown: Installing and using Linux (AsteroidOS) on a TicWatch Pro 2020
- Purism: PureOS Crimson Development Report: September 2025
- The Register: FSF Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob
- Neil Brown: Librephone and the need for more Freedom for mobile computing. _There've been many more takes on the librephone project, but unfortunately I did not find the time to make a blog post that captures the discussion. My personal take is overall positive, regardless of OS, liberating some firmware (and removing the hurdles to do so and run different firmware) can only benefit everyone, no matter what kernel or userland is used with that. Also, I like that things appear to be hosted on codeberg.org.
Worth Listening
Worth Watching
- UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 176. Great episode!
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 176
- School of Intology: Linux Desktop Monitor | Monitor Desktop Vitals & Transfer Files | Ubuntu Touch App Development
- School of Intology: Beast Mode UT: Auto-Save/Backup Photos From Ubuntu Touch to Google Drive | Ubuntu Touch Scripting
- School of Intology: Beast Mode UT: Auto-Save/Backup Photos From Ubuntu Touch to Google Drive | Ubuntu Touch Scripting
- Brodie Robertson: Can The FSF Really Make The Librephone?
- Hendra Wibowo: Install Mobian Phosh GNU/Linux 13 (2025) Poco F1
- DistroTester: Mobian 13.0 Trixie Officially Released with Broader Device Support
- Techlore: My Purism Librem 5 Refund Story
- Survival Wizard: Linux Pinephone
- Luca Weiss: FrOSCon 2025 - postmarketOS - Digital Independence in Your Pocket
- Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E491: SFOS & F-Droid "Play Maker"
- media.ccc.de: Wie man mit PostmarketOS Linux auf dem Handy benutzt #ds25
Worth Noting
- fizzo: "Following the advice from #postmarketOS maintainers, I submitted my nightlight patch to the LKML.Once it will be accepted, it will become available for all the phones using close-to-mainline kernels, without having to manually add the patch to every repository.Upstreaming the code to mainline is the only way of supporting hardware in a sustainable way (from the effort point of view), and everyone benefits of our code.https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-msm/patch/20251018-dpu-add-dspp-gc-driver-v1-1-ed0369214252@izzo.pro/#linuxmobile #upstreamfirst #mainline"
- kcxt (casey): "Trying to summarise my thoughts on what it takes to build an alternative mobile OS. There's some very important and imho rarely discussed reasons why using anything that depends on AOSP is fundamentally a bad idea."
- flamingradian: "Rogers: You wouldn't download a phone plan.It seems like someone got me a new phone, but I still have things to do on the Pixel 3a, and Rogers seems very expensive, so I downloaded my phone plan on a different carrier.both:- downloading the eSIM from the internet- paying for it, as in how Toronto once had to "download" the cost of some provincial highways to their own budgetRogers is also one of the few carriers that pushes IPv6-only."
- daniel: Many exciting projects made it into the latest @NGIZero funding round. My personal favorites are OMEMO v2 (#TWOMEMO 😜) for Converse.js (by @jcbrand) and GTK4 support for @phosh.https://nlnet.nl/news/2025/20251016-selection-NGI0CommonsFund.html #XMPP #Jabber #Converse #OMEMO
- affe_null: "My work on mainlining the #Unisoc UMS9230 SoC has reached a point where the usability of most features is limited by proprietary firmware blobs running on other processors (the camera being a notable exception). I am wondering whether it makes sense to write kernel drivers for them at all or if it is better to work on an open-source reimplementation of the firmware.Thankfully, the #Jolla C2 provides the freedom to replace most of the coprocessor firmware. 1/4"
- affe_null: "Here is the prototype of an open-source coprocessor firmware that works on the Jolla C2's Cortex-M33: https://codeberg.org/affenull2345/opencpIt is pretty much useless as of now (it just sets up the watchdog and runs a "hello world" application), but could later be used to implement an open-source sensor hub and many more things."
- Lemmy.ml - linuxphones: What actively maintained main daily driver options do we even have nowadays?
- #LibrePhone: After reading the FAQ, the way I understand #LibrePhone is not a new phone operating system, but rather an attempt to replace proprietary firmware blobs that as of today are unavoidable on each and every phone-like device no matter how 'free' its OS is marketed.Existing and new operating systems alike could potentially benefit from LibrePhone as long as they run on eligible hardware.https://librephone.fsf.org/FAQ.html
More Software News
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #221 Virus Season
- Allan Day: GNOME Foundation Update, 2025-10-17
- Jussi Pakkanen: Building Android apps with native code using Meson
- Jordan Petridis: Nightly Flatpak CI gets a cache
- Jordan Petridis: The Flatpak Runtime drops the 32-bit compatibility extension
- Bilal Elmoussaoui: Testing a Rust library - Code Coverage
Phosh
- phosh: #Phosh and Phoc had nightlight support since ages but the only phone with out of the box gamma LUT support that could make use of it so far was the #PinePhone.Thanks to @fizzo 's kernel work it works on Qualcomm based phones too now and makes the (optional) night light quick toggle useful on way more devices and looking at the bright AMOLED displays at night much more pleasant.Demo below is on a #SHIFT6mq.#LinuxMobile #wlroots
- agx: With more mobile distros shipping a #feedbackd enabled alarm clock we can show the UI to make the alarm sound configurable with a bit of heuristic (to make sure it's not configurable when not supported):#phosh #LinuxMobile
- Phosh (gotosocial): It's a #phosh 😀 https://chrichri.ween.de/o/1d2b0563ff3045ebbe36f8cb1a90aa41 #PhoshSpotting
- #phosh: @Jc00qe @peja USB - data transferAre you tried a transfer via SSH?Phone > settings > secure shell > enable ssh.Enter in comp terminal: ssh (your user name) @172.16.42.1 confirm the user with password. Open Filemanager and logs through Network: sftp: //172.16.42.1/ Enter: User + Password and Copy Files to the phone. I hope I helped you. Best regards 💪 #postmarketos #gnome #phosh #linuxmobile
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Plasma 6.5 is nigh and KDE is 29 years old; help us celebrate!
- Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
- Nate Graham: Happy 29th birthday to KDE!
- notmart.org: Pixel perfection
- Toscalix: Introducing the SPDX Cryptographic Algorithm List: a Personal View
Sxmo
Sailfish OS
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 16th October 2025 - A new writer
- adampigg: Sound 👍 #sailfishos #tablet, Got UI! @volla #sailfishos
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 167
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 166
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 165
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 164
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 163
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 162
- flypig's NewPipe log: Day 161
- #sailfishOS: Wow, the Sailfish Community got some great news last night. There is now a very much working port of SailfishOS for Sony Nagara (Xperia 1IV and 5IV)! - https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sony-nagara-xperia-1iv-and-5iv-port/25136This is also great news for other community ports that most likely will getting updated images with new functionality.AWESOME!#SailfishOS #SFOS #Lineage
Ubuntu Touch
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Q&A 175, 174 and 173 blog and audio now available
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 176 call for questions.
- UBports - Development - Issues: doesn't work via hands-free.
- UBports - Development - Issues: Wireguard connections are not shown in the UI
- UBports - Development - Issues: [feature request] Mark all as read
- UBports - Development - Issues: Does not appear in openstore results for "telegram"
- UBports - Development - Issues: [feature request] Allow disable suspending of app (Notifications)
- UBports - Development - Issues: Implement switch to keep screen awake
- UBports - Development - Issues: Find a way to expand
/systemvirtual partition from recovery, for devices which usesuperpartition - UBports - Development - Issues: Nix packages support, how to expose to users.
Distributions
- Mobian Blog: A new Stable, and rotating keys
- Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: rockchip: add dkms and gcc for installing PineTab2 Wi-Fi driver
- postmarketOS Wiki Recent Changes: OnePlus 6 (oneplus-enchilada)
Apps
- afranke: Any plans for the weekend? How about trying out #Fractal 13.RC which just got released to find the last things to fix before the stable release?https://discourse.gnome.org/t/fractal-13-rc-released/32001#Matrix #GNOME
- pi_crew: "New version of #GNOME Podcasts app is available, now including episode chapter marks 🥳 https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/podcasts/-/releases/25.3#postmarketOS #LinuxMobile"
- Jozef Mlich on Fosstodon: i have finally figured out how to deal with version number of amazfish on focal and noble. https://github.com/piggz/harbour-amazfish/pull/525Version 2.8.0 will be released soon.Other changes:- Battery graph now shows the last recorded value.- Step graph scales dynamically based on maximum values.- Fixed notifications for GTS+ devices.- Fixed manual selection of device type.- Fixed missing Amazfit GTR3 icon in Qt resources.- Updated translations for Norwegian Bokmål, French, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and Czech
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Letters
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: DeltaTouch
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Cartridges
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Wattage
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Lenspect
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Identities
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Euphonica
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Exhibit
- LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Powersupply
- Hackaday: [Factorio Running On Mobile](https://hackaday.com/2025/10/15/fa ctorio-running-on-mobile/)
- postmarketOS: Apps by Category: K8ie: Add Identities to the list
Kernel
- Phoronix: New Code Merged For Linux 6.18 To Address Linus Torvalds' Rust Formatting Critique
- Phoronix: Linux Display Driver Patches Posted For The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite
- phone-devel: [PATCH] drm/msm/dpu: Add DSPP GC driver to provide GAMMA_LUT DRM property
- phone-devel: Re: [REGRESSION] next/master: (build) undefined reference to `devm_backlight_device_register' in vmlinux...
- phone-devel: Re: [PATCH v2] drm/panel: visionox-rm69299: Depend on BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE
- phone-devel: [PATCH v2] drm/panel: visionox-rm69299: Depend on BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 7/8] arm64: dts: qcom: sdm845-oneplus: Describe TE gpio
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 6/8] arm64: dts: qcom: sdm845-oneplus: Implement panel sleep pinctrl
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 8/8] dt-bindings: display: panel-simple-dsi: Remove Samsung S6E3FC2 compatible
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 4/8] drm/panel: Add Samsung S6E3FC2X01 DDIC with AMS641RW panel
- phone-devel: [PATCH v3 5/8] arm64: dts: qcom: sdm845-oneplus: Group panel pinctrl
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 new framapad 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!