December 23, 20259 min. read

This release is geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts. We are working hard on stability improvements and automated testing, but if you expect Android or iOS levels of polish, then this is not for you yet.

Introduction

The year is coming to a close and while you might be unwrapping other gifts shortly, we have just wrapped up the latest postmarketOS release for you. Following the epic v25.06 release where we added systemd, the most substantial change this time is less visible, but nevertheless very important: a major upgrade of the package manager (more on that below). Besides that you get once more a completely upgraded software stack representing six months of work in upstream projects and in the postmarketOS community.

Software Stack

Alpine Linux 3.23

As always we target the most recent Alpine release. In case of v25.12 it is the excellent Alpine Linux 3.23 and it comes with the new major version 3 of the Alpine Package Keeper, which has been released after five years (!) of development. It includes some really nice changes, such as downloading packages before installing them (which we enabled by default in postmarketOS), so that a flaky internet connection can’t ever break your system again while installing updates. Another long awaited feature is logging all changes to /var/log/apk.log. See the apk3 release notes for more information. Thanks to everybody who worked on apk3 and Alpine Linux 3.23!

User Interfaces (UIs)

Mobile UI Versions

GNOME 49 replaces GNOME 48 from v25.06. As with everything below, we recommend taking a look at upstream’s release notes if you are running this UI to discover all the amazing things that made it in there! The mobile variant stays on 48.mobile.0 for this release. However we are excited to have GNOME Software upgraded from 45.3 (we had to hold it back earlier as the apk plugin couldn’t be adjusted in time) to 49.2 thanks to amazing work by Angelo, Rasmus, Pablo, Sertonix, Achill and Stefan (!91416, !55). Furthermore new installations of postmarketOS now come with all GVFS backends, "allowing for things like connecting to MTP devices out-of-the-box" (!7500). Thanks to all the GNOME contributors!

KDE Plasma Mobile 6.5.3 replaces version 6.3.6 from v25.06. This release brings better Waydroid integration, a faster loading lockscreen, homescreen improvements, and many more things. New installations also come with Plasma Camera 2.1.0 instead of GNOME’s snapshot and use the new plasma-keyboard instead of maliit-keyboard. Thanks to Devin, Bhushan, Andrew, Bart and all the KDE contributors!

Phosh 0.51.0 replaces version 0.47.0 from v25.06. Between these releases, Phosh gained automatic brightness improvements, more adaptive rust portals (account and appchooser) and thumbnail previews for the file chooser portal. The lockscreen can now host multiple media players and there were various quick settings improvements. The Phosh mobile settings app can now display an initial set of settings from the postmarketOS tweaks app, meaning we should soon be able to reduce the settings apps by one (open Mobile Settings, go to its menu, then select Show Configurable Tweaks). This can also be used to easily add your own options to the app without modifying the source code. The Stevia keyboard has new scaling options, a typing indicator popup, can delete whole words with backspace and has autocompletion improvements. Furthermore its terminal layout shortcuts can now be configured in mobile settings. You can watch more demos and vote for features to enable by default. Thanks to Guido, Stefan, Achill and all the Phosh contributors!

Sxmo 1.18.1 replaces 1.17.1 from v25.06, with a bunch of improvements and new features! The most significant change is the support for two new WMs: i3 and river. This release also drops support for callaudiod which used to be the way to switch to "Phone call" audio mode, as it was replaced by proper handling in wireplumber (see also our blog post on wireplumber and callaudiod). Another major new feature is a new Quick Actions menu. Thanks to Willow, Anjan, Maarten, Willow, ArenM and all the Sxmo contributors!

Other Notable Changes

The new about:mobile page in mobile-config-firefox 5.x.

mobile-config-firefox 5.1.0 replaces 4.6.0 from v25.06. It represents half a year of work, in which an about:mobile page was added where users can manually toggle the options that are set by MCF. A long requested feature has been for example, to be able to control whether the address bar is on the bottom or on top. Furthermore the popup handling inside the user interface for opening the Firefox menu, adding bookmarks, etc, has been made more reliable. Thanks to Danny, Peter, Oliver and Jesús from FuriLabs!

Once again we had a lot of fun browsing through the amazing wallpapers that dikasp created for postmarketOS, narrowed them down to a short list of only four and created a Mastodon poll where the final wallpaper was chosen. The winner is Sward with 160/503 votes. Find previous wallpapers in the wiki. Thanks dikasp!

Devices

Lots of kernel upgrades, improvements and bug fixes for all devices. Thanks to all device maintainers and contributors!

After the rules for the community category became stricter, the generic MSM8916 kernel and all devices using it (Arrow DragonBoard 410c, BQ Aquaris X5, Lenovo A6000, Lenovo A6010, Motorola Moto G4 Play, Samsung Galaxy A3, Samsung Galaxy A5, Samsung Galaxy E7, Samsung Galaxy Grand Max, Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Value Edition, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7, Wileyfox Swift , Xiaomi Mi Note 2, Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro, Xiaomi Redmi 2) have been moved to the testing category (!7311). Images for these are still available. Thanks to Nikita et al for taking care of these devices and maintaining them for over 6 years!

MSM8226 devices now use generic packaging (!7279). Thanks, Raymond!

Devices using the APQ8064 kernel have been switched over to the MSM8960 generic device packaging (!7334). Thanks, Rudraksha!

Thanks to all of our amazing device porters, and everybody who contributed!

• ASUS MeMO Pad 7 (ME176C(X))

• Fairphone 4

• Generic x86_64

• Google Chromebooks with x86_64 CPU

• Google Gru Chromebooks

• Google Kukui Chromebooks

• Google Nexus 10

• Google Oak Chromebooks

• Google Pixel 3A

• Google Pixel 3A XL

• Google Trogdor Chromebooks

• Google Veyron Chromebooks

• Generic Qualcomm MSM8953

• Lenovo ThinkSmart View new

• Motorola Moto G5 Plus

• Xiaomi Mi A1

• Xiaomi Redmi 4 Prime

• Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus

• Xiaomi Redmi 7

• Xiaomi Redmi Note 4

• (and more in the testing category)

• Generic Qualcomm SM7150

• Xiaomi Mi 9T / Redmi K20

• Xiaomi POCO X3 NFC

• (and more in the testing category)

• Lenovo ThinkPad X13s

• Microsoft Surface RT

• NVIDIA Tegra ARMv7

• Nokia N900

• ODROID XU4

• OnePlus 6

• OnePlus 6T

• PINE64 PinePhone

• PINE64 PinePhone Pro

• PINE64 Pinebook Pro

• PINE64 ROCKPro64

• Purism Librem 5

• SHIFT6mq

• Samsung Chromebook

• Samsung Chromebook 2 11.6"

• Samsung Galaxy Core Prime VE LTE

• Samsung Galaxy S III (GT-I9300 and SHW-M440S)

• Samsung Galaxy S9

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1 inch)

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0 inch)

• Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro

• Xiaomi Poco F1

Device/UI Testing And Known Issues

A huge thank you to device maintainers and the testing team, and people who spontaneously decided to take part in testing this new release (#4169) and fixing bugs right before finalizing it! If you would like to join the fun next time, add yourself to the Testing Team.

The following issues are as of writing not yet resolved, help with fixing them is appreciated. See related issues for more information (workarounds etc.):

• #2214: no recognized webcam/camera device on Acer Chromebook Tab 10
• #4188: /etc/os-release, /etc/motd from alpine can overwrite pmOS files on upgrade
• #3253, #3320: oneplus 6 call audio problems
• #4118, #1798: wifi hotspots broken with networkmanager 1.54.0
• #3814: suspend causes reboot on fairphone 5, xiaomi-davinci/qcom-sm7150
• #4194: librem5: modem sleeping too deep, signaling problems

How To Get It

New Installation

Look at install postmarketOS and make sure to read the wiki page for your device.

Upgrade

For existing installations, see the upgrade to a newer postmarketOS release wiki article. When upgrading from v25.06, /usr merge will be done automatically.

Recommended manual steps after upgrading:

• Plasma Mobile: switch to Plasma Camera and Plasma Keyboard

• apk add plasma-camera plasma-keyboard

• apk del snapshot maliit-keyboard

• GNOME (Mobile) and Phosh: use gvfs-full

• apk add gvfs-full

• apk del gvfs-afc gvfs-afp gvfs-archive gvfs-avahi gvfs-cdda gvfs-dav gvfs-fuse gvfs-goa gvfs-gphoto2 gvfs-mtp gvfs-nfs gvfs-smb

• Changes in systemd packaging between v25.06 and v25.12 have the effect that any systemd units that were enabled manually may be automatically disabled during the upgrade. If you did manually enable some, double check that they are still enabled and consider creating a preset config for these custom services in /etc (#3971).

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A big thanks to everybody who contributed to postmarketOS, to Alpine or to any of the numerous upstream components we use — without you this would not be possible! ❤️

We would also like to thank NLnet and NGI Zero Core for funding most of the infrastructure and maintenance work that went into this release. NLnet is funding a lot of great free software projects, including quite a few projects in the Linux Mobile world. If you would like to get your project funded, consider applying for a grant!

And what’s next?

Developments in postmarketOS edge are not stopping. For example, we upgraded to systemd 259 there (!7584, now without downstream musl patches!) and switched to greetd and phrog for starting phosh (!6106). Expect a new blog post about changes in edge in 2026.

Members of the postmarketOS community and wider Linux Mobile scene can be found at various upcoming events:

• 39C3 (2025-12-27 to 30 in Hamburg, DE)
• FOSDEM 2026 (2026-01-31 to 02-01 in Brussels, BE)
• OSC Tokyo 2026 Spring (2026-02-27 to 28 in Tokyo, JP)

If you appreciate the work we’re doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.

This blog post was written by Oliver. Header image by Oliver based on the Sward wallpaper by dikasp, the cute pmOS logo with arms by Ranny and various project logos.