The Linux distribution aimed at phones and tablets, postmarketOS, is working on several under-the-hood changes and an experimental ‘immutable’ version. The operating system is also now available on more devices, like the Fairphone 6 and iPhone X.
If you’re not familiar with the project, postmarketOS is one of the ongoing efforts to bring a full desktop Linux experience to mobile devices, based on Alpine Linux. It can use mobile-optimized versions of GNOME, KDE, and other shells, and it’s available on a wide variety of devices. It’s not as stable as a typical iOS or Android device, or even most desktop Linux distributions, but it’s an impressive effort that is making great progress.
During the month of July, postmarketOS was ported to seven new devices and three generic device families. The Fairphone 6 is one of the new additions, though support for Wi-Fi, cellular services, camera, and other core features is still missing.
The most interesting port might be the iPhone X—that’s right, Apple’s 2017 flagship smartphone can boot into postmarketOS, as seen in the above photo. The port is based on workarounds and exploits built by the Hoolock Linux and Asahi Linux projects. This is another device build where almost nothing works, but hey, you have to start somewhere. The full list of new devices from the changelog is below.
Meanwhile, more work is progressing on an immutable version of postmarketOS. Like other immutable Linux distributions, it would set the system and configuration directories as read-only access, which could “rule out whole classes of errors for end-users that can currently happen when upgrading the package based systems.” There’s still no timeline for when it could be ready for most postmarketOS users to try out.
Finally, postmarketOS is preparing for its big /usr merge, which will move everything in the system /bin, /sbin, and /lib directories into subdirectories under the /usr folder. This will simplify the system structure and eliminate “a common source of annoying-to-debug issues.” The team plans to move all edge users to the merged system on August 27th, 2025.
You can head over to the official postmarketOS website for more information and installation instructions. Don’t try it on an important phone or tablet, though.
Source: postmarketOS blog
