this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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You're pissed about it? Visit here: https://opencollective.com/postmarketOS
IMHO that's our best shot. Totally Google free, mainstream Linux kernel.
That’s not how you spell UBports.
I do support the PostmarketOS project, but it has much further to go before it’s friendly enough for regular people. Short of Valve releasing a Steam phone, I think UBports is better positioned to bring genuine linux to mobile.
No one here is talking about regular people. Regular people will keep using stock Android.
UBports still relies on Android kernel and services. Custom ROMs are such a small part of the Android ecosystem that I didn't think Google will go after them yet they did. Can we be sure in a couple of years they will not try to destroy Android based distros like UBports?
I also don't really like the entire idea behind UBports. It's so heavily modified you can't even easily run native Linux apps so you're limited to Ubuntu Touch apps. As a developer I'm not really interested in learning completely new framework that supports only one platform. We have solutions to create cross platform Linux-Android apps so I can move my apps from Android phone to PostmarketOS without any work, they already work there.
So I'm supporting PostmarketOS and I really hope it will be usable when my Pixel phone dies. If not I will switch to something Halium based. What else is there to do?
Yeah I agree. I've used PMOS as well as Lineage and Graphene. The latter was the best experience and PMOS was the one that needed the most work, at least to reach any sort of side adoption.
I'm actually looking at something running SailfishOS as my potential happy mid-point, but currently the Jolla phone - which would be my preferred device for this - doesn't seem to shop outside Europe yet.
Can you install generic apks on UBports, or only precompiled .deb packages and other native Linux applications?
It’s a full version of Linux. It also has a desktop mode if you want to use it with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. You have all the same control you would have on other Ubuntu-based flavors. You do need to keep your device’s architecture in mind.
Is 20.04 the latest release?
No, it’s currently on 24.
The version number with “OTA-#” at the end is the “over the air” updater.
Don't worry as the current OEMs continue to lock down bootloaders and lock required drivers behind copyright and other restrictive licensing schemes they will ensure nice things like PostmarketOS at best remain fringe and never able to replace modern phones for daily usage.
Most of they will but hopefully we will still have projects like PinePhone or Fairphone that will support it.
Does this also work with android tablets? Or is there a separate os for those?
Here you can see current state: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
In theory it will just be another Linux able to run on everything Linux supports + Android hardware. Honestly I don't know if it will ever run on common modern phones but it should at least be possible to run it on more "open" phones like Fairphone or PinePhone.
If the above is where we are at still with PostmarketOS, it will be a decade or more before it is anything more than a curiosity. The table stakes of what people, even us tech nerds, expect from a smartphone fit for daily use is so much more than "it can make phones calls and the UI works" it is not even funny.
As I said, I don't think we can expect PostmarketOS to work on normal phones but looking at the table they have PinePhone figured out. My hope is that we will soon see something like PinePhone but with proper specs that will actually be usable and that some phone makes like Fairphone will help make PostmaketOS run on their phones. Couple of properly supported models is all we really need and I hope it's couple of years away, not a decade.
Can you just refuse to upgrade your 2021 or previous (nothing on their device list applies to models released after 2021) to not be affected by this policy change? I have never noticed a useful feature in android version upgrades for quite a while now.
Yes but you will also stop getting security fixes. After some time it gets risky.