Walid: Welcome to the podcast Projets Libres, LinuxFr.org’s podcast. I’m your host Walid Nouh and today we’ll be talking about postmarketOS, a Linux operating system for your mobile phones. I’m very excited for this as I’m a user of postmarketOS myself on one of my phones, and when I went to FOSDEM 2026 to meet the team, I was told that there were no French speakers. But in fact, it turns out there are two French speakers who are here with me today! Antoine Martin and Ranny Bergamotte are both trusted contributors to postmarketOS. So Ranny and Antoine, welcome to the podcast. I hope you’re doing well.
Antoine: Well, thank you very much Walid for inviting us to participate in your podcast. My name is Antoine Martin, pronouns he/him. I’ve been a trusted contributor, I think, since December 2025. It’s really nice to be here!
Walid: And Ranny, welcome to you too.
Ranny: Thank you. I’m Ranny, I’ve been a trusted contributor for a year now. I’ve been in the project for about two years and I’m mainly involved in things around marketing and art.
Introduction of the guests
Walid: Great. Let’s start with some introductions. So please tell us who you are, and when did you start discovering free software? Ranny, I’ll let you start if you want?
Ranny: Yeah, so as mentioned I mainly do marketing and art. In that sense, I’m one of the least technical contributors: I don’t know much of anything about coding. But there are plenty of other things to do in postmarketOS. So, for example, I’m the maintainer for the artwork repository which hosts marketing assets, designs, wallpapers, and other works of art. I’ve made quite a few stickers, and also worked on pamphlets for the conferences. And there are many other small things to work on. What was the other question? I forgot.
Walid: How did you discover free software?
Ranny: It started I was maybe around 14 years old. And I was given an old laptop that was like at least 10 years old that had Windows 7. It was far too slow. And so, I put Xubuntu on it, which was how I was introduced to Linux. Then later, I got new laptop, I went back to Windows for a while. But then Windows 11 came out and it annoyed me so much that I decided to go back to Linux.
Ever since then, since I don’t donate to FOSS projects, I started to contribute with my time: especially as I’m a student I had time. So I started contributing to free software projects. And one day, being tired of phone brainrot, I wanted to try using Linux on mobile phones, so I bought a PinePhone Pro and I put postmarketOS on it.
Actually, it’s a bit of a funny story. After trying to upgrade the firmware, I bricked the PinePhone Pro modem. I ended up taking everything apart, looking over the schematics, trying to rescue my phone, and after three months, realized I had accidentally bridged a resistor when trying to recover the modem. At the end though, messaging still doesn’t work, because the mobile data providers here in America don’t support the telephone… so I still don’t use it. But in the process I ended up in postmarketOS, and now I’m stuck here.
Walid: Excellent. And you, Antoine?
Antoine: Yeah, so my story is very similar to Ranny’s. I was young, 14-15 years old, with a lot of time and a deep frustration with Windows which led me to install Linux for the first time. In fact, it took three attempts at the time, but after the third one, I was sold. Then, over the years, I have continued to use Linux.
The question arose for me of how could we free mobile computing? And me too, my background and experiences aren’t very technical, I didn’t study computer science. Really, I learned as they say in Quebec, “sur le tas” (on the job). In fact, I started with Alpine Linux when it came to contributing to free software and also learned a lot from system administration.
And so, naturally, I became a package maintainer. And eventually, I wanted to give my time to postmarketOS, especially as we have a governance project going on at the moment and I have some expertise in this area. Despite my studies in sociology, I spent a lot of time learning how to start organizations especially community organizations. Currently, I’m working on creating the legal entity of postmarketOS. We’ll talk about the benefits later, and also our thinking about how we can make our spaces accessible to a diversity of people.
What is postmarketOS?
Walid: Very interesting, these introductions. So for those who don’t know, let’s start with, how would you define postmarketOS? Antoine?
Antoine: So as mentioned before, postmarketOS is a Linux-based operating system that aims to be installed on smartphones and is open source, free software, based on Linux. As we are a relatively new project from 2017, postmarketOS is really aimed at developers, hackers, hobbyists, amateurs, people who will necessarily be more skilled with technology.
But obviously, on our roadmap, we want to address the general public so that people’s phones can really be theirs. So the mission really is to develop free systems aimed at mobile devices extending their lifetime and above all giving users the means to fully control their devices.
So it mainly comes down to two points:
- Sustainable development: making phones last longer than they were initially designed, and so we really are aiming for 10 years of support
- Digital sovereignty: We believe that computers should act in the best interests of their users, and therefore not contribute to the nightmare that targeted privacy advertising represents. And so, necessarily, we have an emancipatory vision of the big GAFAMs (FAANG or Big Tech), the big technology companies which, as we can see today, are causing us a lot of problems.
So, I would say those are the most important aspects.
Walid: How is postmarketOS different from the other Linux distributions that we can currently find for these phones? What really makes postmarketOS different?
Antoine: So, for example, how does it differ from Android (which technically is based on downstream Linux), which would be, of course, the most direct alternative? Very simply, Android, although it is free software in the broad sense of the word, is mainly under Google’s control. Over the years, we see this is becoming more and more of an issue, as Google continues to regulate the development of Android and making it difficult to access its ecosystem.
For users, there is also this problematic relationship with Android, since it’s an ecosystem that is becoming more of a walled garden, a bit like Apple. And increasingly, it’s virtually impossible to use Android and iOS without a Google or Apple account. Within this operating system, there is a direct integration of targeted advertising by technical things like Advertising ID Client, things that give a direct identity to our phones, allowing advertisers to target us directly. This is a privacy nightmare.
There’s also like this promotion of apps that are proprietary, that collect our data as well. The list of problems from here could be endless. Also, from September 2026, it will become more complicated, in fact, impossible, to install third-party applications on Android without going through Google Play, without going through the entire identity confirmation structure of the people who develop the applications. In the end, despite Android being called an open platform, users have to comply with Google’s vision.
In the broader political context, especially in the U.S., there’s a concern on the rise of fascism among big tech, and so we find ourselves as a user, politically, vulnerable. In that context, we want to develop, to stand from Android, and put both the technical and sociopolitical foundations so that our apps, phones and computers we are ours, for us.
As for how we fit into the Linux ecosystem broadly, we aim to have high amounts of collaboration with Linux mobile distributions. We explicitly work with other partners to develop the Linux kernel and other interfaces such as Phosh, Plasma, Gnome, SXMO, ModemManager, to name a few.
We benefit from the work of these projects, but we do also do development that we then contribute upstream. And also at the kernel development level, we have an approach that aims to contribute directly to the mainline kernel. This means we can’t be in our little corner doing our own thing, we are in this larger ecosystem that aims for a future similar to ours, and we have an upstream-first approach so that everyone can benefit.
Walid: I think we’ll cover it later, but yes, this upstream-first approach towards the mainline linux kernel, it’s something that’s quite different from some other Linux distributions. I’m thinking of people like Ubuntu Touch or even SailfishOS who have taken different approaches. That’s what attracted me to postmarketOS. It’s this philosophy of, if people do the work once in upstream, making changes in mainline, it then benefits everyone who no longer need to re-implement the work.
Antoine: 100%. Because that’s really where the strength of free software shows up here, that we can share our work with others. It means as a community, being able to pool our time, energy, resources and infrastructure in such a way that we can all benefit from it. And so a lot of the porting work we do is involved in taking those downstream kernels made by manufacturers and upstreaming it. We obviously start with downstream kernels to get things working, but very quickly, we discourage their use. We want to avoid being unable to update our own kernels. In any case, I’m sure we’ll talk more about it later.
The history of postmarketOS
Walid: So now let’s go back to the very beginning. Could you tell us more about the history of postmarketOS? I discovered it through the postmarketOS podcasts, where, in the very first podcast episode, y’all talk about the history of postmarketOS, which is quite interesting. Perhaps, Ranny, do you want to explain to us, if you know, how postmarketOS came about, who works on it and why the person decides to create postmarketOS?
Ranny: So postmarketOS was created privately in 2016 by Ollie Paranoid and then published in 2017.
He first posted to Hacker News and Reddit, where quite a few people found the project and then joined. A community formed around the project, and eventually leading into the community and team we have today.
At the time, Ollie was really frustrated with the phone software offerings that existed at the time, based on reasons we mentioned earlier like Android’s lack of digital sovereignty and privacy. Also at that time, a few Linux on mobile projects existed, but targeted only at specific phones, which meant if you wanted a different phone, you basically had to hack together a whole new distribution.
Faced with this, he made postmarketOS compatible with multiple phones by using device specific packages that could be installed when creating the image. This is done through pmbootstrap which glues it all together, creating a tool that allows you to generate the image. And it also allows for much faster development by allowing you to use and patch local packages.
Walid: And from the start, he said “we’re going to put up with phones for 10 years”?
Ranny: So originally, a question that came up was the name of the distribution. A name like “distribution against the main industry” wouldn’t work, and so, he reflected on one of the problems of Android phones being that they tend to only receive updates for 2-3 years. Maybe security updates for 3 years at most, that’s about it. And so, you’re constantly forced to buy a new phone.
So, basically, based off of that, the name became postmarketOS: “post” meaning after, and “market”, the market. So, supporting phones that are after market. He then thought: what is a phone that is really after market and that we could support? The Nokia N900, which was already 10 years old at that point. And so the decision was made, let’s do a 10-year support!
Walid: At first, when he created postmarketOS, it was just a collective. That is, it’s just people coming in and starting to work together. So there was like no association or anything at the beginning?
Ranny: Again, definitely recommend the first podcast episode. It was recorded in 2020, so three years after the start of the project. The beginning was definetly more ad-hoc, like the package build system was a server that was running in the closet, and that only Ollie had access to. So there were a lot of things like that.
Walid: It was home-made.
Ranny: Definitely yes! I believe too from the podcast, for example, that well, Ollie was the only person who had permissions at first. So, as some contributors started hanging out in the community, to help move project forward permission was granted quite quickly. Of course, nowadays, we are a little more careful and have an onboarding application process. But in those times… Yeah, they were just hacking and building the system together from ground up.
Walid: From the first episode, I have the impression that the very first people who arrived were more Europeans?
Ranny: Yes, there was also Clayton who is from US west coast. But yes, otherwise, mainly, it’s Europeans, and I have the impression that a lot are also from Germany. But I think that’s probably because FOSS is more popular and worked on in Europe than in America.
Walid: Antoine, do you have anything to add?
Antoine: Even before the creation of a current process to set up a legal entity, I think that for at least 2-3 years the governance practices have been constantly re-evaluated within postmarketOS so that we can work better together and integrate more and more people.
In fact, I think it’s been three or two years since the Trusted Contributor Program was created, finally allowing us to get out of the initial collective a bit, and onboard new people to be able to expand our development capabilities further.
So, that’s something that is still, I would say, for me a critical point in the history of postmarketOS, because not all projects have this. This reflex of asking oneself “Ah, but how can we expand? How can we get out of our collective of original founders?”
Ranny: To add to that, we have grown, especially in the last few years, because of the evolution of the governance structure and because of the efforts to recruit.
I believe that Pablo a core contributor on our team, had said “it took us more than six years to have eight contributors on the team, but in the last three years, we have gotten 21 new team members”. So especially in recent years, our project and community has grown, allowing us to really move forward on projects, do automation and really do new things and new projects in postmarketOS.
What hardware runs postmarketOS
Walid : Currently, to give people an idea, do you estimate that how many phones are supported? And are there only phones or are there also computers, tablets? What do you know about the number of supported devices?
Ranny : Yeah, so I know that there are about a hundred phones that are pretty well-supported. There are quite a few phones that are downstream, which usually means some individual contributor who put together a package to make it work from those android kernels, but most of the time doesn’t use the latest version of Linux.
So, of course, there are old phones like the Nokia N900, and there are also modern phones. One of our team members, Luca Weiss, is part of Fairphone. And so, the Fairphone 5 and 6, when they came out, got postmarketOS support from day one.
And then, of course, we support other devices other than phones. We have things like tablets. Of course, we support x86 laptops and desktops. We also have Chromebooks, because a lot of Chromebooks run on ARM and not x86. So, we support a lot of Chromebooks. There are also SBCs (Single board computers), so for example the Raspberry Pi or different SBCs from Radxa. What I really like about postmarketOS is seeing all the different ways that hardware is used. There are people who use phones to do VJing or art.
Oh yes, I had also seen at one point, Luca had posted about how they had tested tethered smart glasses with postmarketOS. There are people who have run kubernetes clusters on their phones. There was a person who had used their phone to make a server to run their 3D printer. There was someone who was running their Matrix homeserver.
I had also seen a post where someone had used a watch that made the postmarketOS work on the watch. And the watch was like a necklace for a little doll, it was very cute. And yes, there are plenty of phones, lots of other small, more exotic equipment such as watches, glasses, etc. And with all different ways of working.
Walid : And Antoine, for example, what devices are best supported? Let’s say I don’t have a phone yet and I want to try to postmarketOS on let’s say a second-hand phone. Does the project recommend any phones?
Antoine : This is the question that led us to rework our different categories of devices that we support. We actually have four categories that allow us to communicate the expectations that users should have of the devices we support. Either downstream, testing, community and main.
The main category is really to communicate that these devices are the best supported. In fact, we have reworked the main category to remove all the devices that we are not able to say that this is ready to be used on a daily basis. This led to us now having zero devices in there. But the high standards mean as soon as we get something in there, that means on that device we can confidently say it should daily-drivable.
To answer your question, at the moment, since the project is at a level where it’s more for people who are developing, people who are hobbyists, we’re not there yet. That said, my hobby is also to support more exotic devices. I am personally the maintainer for PineNote, which a tablet with an e-ink screen like an e-reader. I think that tablets and laptops are very easy to support because, they don’t have the most complex components such as modems, which are very difficult to develop because there is often proprietary code that has to be reverse engineered and re-implemented.
Walid : Tablets have another advantage too, which is that the screen is bigger. And so you have fewer problems with the app layouts then on small phone screens. On mobile, there are many applications where you have to scale it to 100%, or else it overflows the screen, and it’s very small, you can’t really see where you’re clicking. Whereas for tablets, it ends up being a less buggy experience.
Ranny : Thanks to the efforts of upstream projects though, support for smaller screens in recent years has improved a lot, especially in projects like GNOME and Plasma Mobile. Now, we have the applications that use Kirgami or is Adwaita that are responsive frameworks.
Antoine : And if I may continue on a few things for the community category, there are still many devices that you can easily use. The support is quite good. But for our standards, we weren’t there yet. So, also, in the main category that we have reworked, we plan to have a whole team around these devices so that there really is a consistent support structure around this device. So that eventually, the people who install this, don’t need to worry that an update is going to break something and that support won’t be abandoned. That’s what we want to avoid.
Walid : But if today, for example, I’m a bit of a geek, I want to test postmarketOS, are there any good phones? Like their support might not be perfect, but it’s good enough to try?
Ranny : I would definitely say again look at another wiki, where there are all the phones listed, but I know, for example, the OnePlus 6 and the Pixel 3a are phones that are quite popular and pretty well-supported. Functions like cell calling with the modem work. And also, Fairphone, because of Luca’s involvement, and the hardware itself is repair friendly, has pretty good support. So, that’s what I recommend, but still, but definitely look on the wiki for more details.
Antoine : Absolutely. Our wiki has feature support documentation and lots of documentation the devices themselves in great detail and how to flash and install postmarketOS. The devices page features a table, where you can see which devices have which features supported.
Walid : For listeners who want to know more typically about why the OnePlus 6 and 6T are devices that are very well-supported on Linux, I invite you to listen to the episode with Arnaud Ferraris of the introduction of Linux on mobile because he goes into quite detail about these platforms and why they are well-supported.
Moving on to the operation of postmarketOS, then how does the development work? What are the different functions? Who is working on what? How is development organized?
Antoine : So that’s definitely a focus area for me, I love thinking about the workflow and how we work together. That’s what makes the difference between a one-person project and a 100-person project. To start with, all the development is done on our own GitLab, our own code forge. The central repo, pmaports, is the repo in which we have all the package definitions: the kernels, the device packages. That is really the heart of development.
All change proposals and merge requests are made within GitLab. For project decisions and discussions, we also organize ourselves both synchronously and asynchronously. Every two weeks, we hold an hour-long team meeting where all team members are invited to participate and bring up topics for discussion. We also record those discussions, and then any decisions are made asynchronously on GitLab which allows our contributors who can’t make the synchronous meetings to participate. This allows anyone on the team regardless of their time commitments, timezone, and interest to participate whether it be technical governance, organizational governance or simple decisions. For smaller decisions, it is also subject to a quorum of 25%. So we really try to make the process as democratic as possible.
We also have several working committees, but they are more ad hoc. There are a few permanent working committees. Depending on the needs of the team, some small committees or working groups are created. For example, I am on the foundation committee to help work on the foundation of the legal entity for postmarketOS. Development is organized by attaching maintainers to packages, packages that ultimately manage the devices. Sometimes, we have teams around more specific devices.
Ranny : There’s also infrastructure.
Antoine : Yes, the infrastructure team takes care of the GitLab, websites, and all the technical infrastructure of the project. Finance mostly approves transactions. We also have a moderation group that manages online chats, as well as the testing team that manages the testing phase of the devices before releasing a new version of postmarketOS. Finally, we also have code of conduct committee, so they intervene when there are conflicts or when there is someone who does not respect our code of conduct.
Walid : A question. So, these online meetings, every two weeks, at what time are they done? I imagine if you have people who are in the Europe, United States, Japan, so what time zone do you use?
Antoine : Our bi-weekly general meeting is always Central Europe 8 pm. We use Central Europe as that is where we have the highest concentration of contributors.
Ranny : And recently we’ve begun recording our meetings internally. That way, people who can’t attend can also listen in afterward. And then we moved all the decisions to being made asynchronously on GitLab. This allows you to make decisions without being in meetings. In fact, for transparency all our meeting notes are then publicly posted in our Handbook. Even the public can know what we talked about in each meeting because we want to be a very transparent organization.
Walid : And for day-to-day communication, you have a Matrix channel. Is that what you use to chat with each other on a daily basis?
Antoine : Yes, we have matrix channels which are also bridged to IRC. Each team member also has an email for convenience.
Team member profiles
Walid : In the team, there are different skill sets, so like you Ranny you do more art things and barely any code. So there are different profiles of people. What could you say about the different types of people in postmarketOS? Or is it just lot of technical people?
Ranny : I’d say we are definitely more a diverse team. Some parts like the artistic part is really rather small, but I know that, for example, we have some recurring contributors like dikasp who makes some beautiful wallpapers.
And then, from time to time, we have contributors who come to put stickers or other wallpapers. I have also worked with PastelSolitude to make a new mascot.
Ranny: Coming soon, we hope to be able to have a new mascot when the new name of the project comes. Unfortunately, we can’t say much about it right now, due to waiting for the trademark. And so, yes, anyone can join [the project]. I also know, for example, on the non-technical side, Antoine could say more about the people who work on governance and finance.
The future postmarketOS name change
Walid : Wait, why do you want to change your name? Why not postmarketOS?
Ranny : We decided to change our name for several reasons. We found postmarketOS is a bit long, the name isn’t the prettiest, and we want to go beyond the idea that we’re stuck on devices that are old. Nowadays, we are looking to support new devices like the Fairphone. This may also become relevant in the future if we want to work with phone manufacturers.
It took us a while to come up and decide with a name, but we eventually got there. Unfortunately, we haven’t finalized the trademark yet, but in principle, it should happen, hopefully very soon. Alas, these things take time.
The rhythm of release of versions
Walid : Antoine, did you want to add something?
Antoine : yes, I could also mention how we manage the release frequencies, as this is also an important aspect of our operation and since our upstream is Alpine Linux.
We mainly follow the release schedule of Alpine Linux. Each version of postmarketOS is based off of the latest stable version of Alpine. For example, at the moment, we are still waiting for the release of Alpine Linux version 3.24 to then start the testing phase of postmarketOS version 26.06, which finally allows us to make a release. Usually about a month after Alpine Linux.
So, that means that between releases, there are six months, and we still have a channel called Edge, which is still under development.
Walid : I didn’t ask at first, but why is postmarketOS based on Alpine Linux?
Ranny : I believe the idea was that Alpine Linux was a great fit since it is extremely lightweight. And for phones, this is extremely important especially for older phones as they may not be able to afford as much performance.
Antoine : I’d also add to that, maybe it’s the package maintainer part of me, but I find the Alpine Linux package format very elegant. Package definitions are very accessible. From what I understand too, during the construction of the infrastructure, necessarily an infrastructure that must support several different types of processors, i.e. x86, ARM, ARM32, ARM64, RISC-V, etc… There are few distributions that are able to offer such a dynamic and accessible infrastructure similar to Arch Linux’s KISS philosophy, Keep It Stupid, Simple. In any case, for me, that’s one of the reasons why I started contributing to Alpine Linux and that postmarketOS seemed attractive. I think it’s a very elegant system for compiling and managing packages.
Projects supported by postmarketOS
Walid : In the general episode on Linux on mobile, at one point, Arnaud talks about different projects that are supported by postmarketOS. He speaks, for example, of 81VoltD. Do you have any subprojects that are created through postmarketOS, which then, behind them, will benefit the rest of the ecosystem?
Antoine : The idea is that the people who contribute to postmarketOS have the freedom to set up projects that can be useful to other projects. 81VoltD is an example. A project that we have just announced, funding for it, is q6voice(d). I don’t know the technical details, but it allows Qualcomm-based devices, I think, to handle audio calls. So there re initiatives among developers and us to work on these problems, and create budget to allow for development. An of course we try to make these projects be able to be beneficial to everyone.
The different application reposes
Walid : We’ll talk about financing later because it’s very interesting. I wanted to talk about the packaging of the applications. We talked about Alpine Linux: when you launch the postmarketOS application store, you have several sources to get your applications. What are some of those sources?
Antoine : yes, I would say that the main source is the main repository of Alpine Linux. In fact, when you do apk add firefox, for example, it will pull from the Alpine Linux repositories. For other things, like the specific kernels that we use, it pulls from our own package repos that we compile ourselves. There is also Flatpak which is used for some applications that are not integrated into Alpine Linux. I, personally, am the maintainer for the Electron package, which is used by several desktop applications such as Signal or VS Code. I’m the maintainer, but it’s a package that is exceedingly difficult to maintain well because… I’m going to blame Google here, but anyway, it’s quite a complex program. That’s why it’s still in the testing repository, so it’s not yet supported for stable releases. Of course, this means that postmarketOS also depends on Flatpak packages for some end-user features like Signal, for example, unless people want to test the Signal package. In any case, I’m also the maintainer for that. And then, to date, it’s holding up very well, but sometimes we don’t know until someone out there lets us know.
Walid : That’s interesting. So there is an Alpine Linux package for Signal? Is that what you’re saying?
Antoine : Yes. In testing, I’m trying to improve the ecosystem, the support for Electron and Electron-based applications to be supported natively without having to go through Flatpak. But it still takes a lot of time because the development cycle of Electron is very, very fast. As a volunteer, I’m not always able to keep up.
Note: it seems that a Linux version arm64 is in progress at Signal**.
Walid : As part of this packaging process, I’m curious, for example, in examples like Ubuntu Touch, and Fla from Framasoft that I interviewed pointed me to commits where they have patches typically for Signal, to make the interface responsive. Is this something you do in postmarketOS: do you try to work with upstream directly and report bugs or patch it in packing by fixing by the application?
Antoine : Our policy is to really focus on upstream as much as possible. So when there are patches in the packaging that are large changes, it’s really more of a hack and considered as temporary. In the end, we are not aiming to create a zombification of packages in which we create our own version of something. And that’s also the trend of Alpine Linux’s policy in this area.
Ranny : The packages that we do end up having in our repos are mainly specific things for phones or certain machines. For all applications, we tend to always do upstream in Alpine, That way, everyone can benefit from it.
Walid : When you package an application for Alpine Linux, is there any difference between the mobile version and the desktop versions or are they the same versions?
Antoine : They are the same versions. That’s why we really encourage upstream projects. That said, there is one exception, that is worth mentioning: from memory, it’s the Firefox Mobile Config, which is a mobile configuration created to be able to make Firefox dynamic and more adaptable to smaller screens. This is a bit of an exception, but it seems to me that it’s also a project that is maintained in such a way that other mobile Linux projects can use it too.
Supported desktop environments
Ranny : Also, the desktop environments are packaged in our pmaports.
Walid : Based off earlier, we talked about some desktop environments like [KDE] Plasma Mobile, GNOME [Shell Mobile]. What is available in postmarketOS?
Ranny : Sure! One of the most popular is Phosh, which is based on GNOME. There’s Plasma Mobile, which is KDE-based. There’s SXMO, which is a tiling window manager. There’s GNOME Mobile, which is based on GNOME, of course.
Then there are others like Lomiri, XFCE., Cosmic, Sway, i3wm, Mate. We also have support for desktops aimed at large screens like Plasma Bigscreen and Kodi. So we have many different environments for different use-cases, and that’s one thing that makes me love postmarketOS, is since these are just packages, it means we can combine any device with any environment.
Walid : Similar to devices, are there also maintainers responsible for desktop environments?
Antoine: Yes.
Walid: Wow, that’s a lot of people and packages.
Antoine : Definitely! We thankfully have a lot of volunteers and maintainers, some of the interfaces have several people maintaining them. This however did lead us to trying to better organize ourselves to welcome a larger number of people on our team.
Walid : Are some of the environments friendlier and have better support, or are there some that are more popular than others? I had the impression that Plasma-Mobile, Phosh and SXMO, were like the main ones.
? Ranny : Yes, generally, Plasma-Mobile, Phosh, Gnome Mobile, and SXMO are the ones with the best support for phones. Especially Phosh I think, as it’s partially developed by Purism I think. And then, yes, there are others that are more experimental like Cosmic, which is just maintained by Clayton.
The postmarketOS Hardware Integration Test System (hardware-ci)
Walid : I would like to hear about the testing system, because at FOSDEM, this year, there was a talk on it where the team explained the hardware testing system they have set up.
Ranny : There are two parts to testing, one being the team which Antoine can talk more about, and the hardware CI that I can cover.
Walid : Sure, let’s hear about the hardware CI first.
Ranny : So as mentioned, we’ve been working on a hardware CI system. It’s something we’re really happy about that we did it, and we’re still working on. It is a system that allows you to test phones or any device through the GitLab CI.
So how does it work? Let’s say for example that every phone, we want to test a new version of Linux on it with patches that we have made. The phone is connected to a hardware harness that we created ourselves, that is FOSS and on our GitLab.
The device harness provides several functions. First it provides power to the phone as running from the battery over several years would be considered a fire safety risk. So the device harness has a built-in power supply capability for the phone.
The phone itself can use a special U-Boot build or Fastboot and can receive the testing image through the hardware harness, and then connects to a server. The server can be basically anything, like a Raspberry Pi or anything that works with CI-Tron. CI-Tron is a program that communicates between GitLab and the phone and that is used, for example, by Valve to test their SteamDeck.
What CI-Tron does is it grabs the image from GitLab, and then it deploys it to the phone. It then takes the test results and sends the results back to the GitLab runner. On the GitLab side, you can make the tests work automatically, such as whenever a modification is made to a kernel in pmaports. The GitLab runner will compile the kernel, send it to the CI-Tron, get it to run on the device, and report back the result.
Eventually, we want to add tests for more specific things like cameras. The idea is that you can say, if you’ve made changes in the camera software stack, it could take a picture and then send back the picture. I know that someone had also, talked about making a test for calls. The phone places a call to a VoIP we would set up, and there would be a speaker next to the phone’s microphone that would play a recording to the phone so that we can compare with the receiving end. Then, we could also repeat the recording back and using a microphone see if it sounds good. This allows us to perform tests on physical phones automatically which will then allow us to have much fewer bugs and to do things much faster since it is all automated.
Walid : Super interesting! So, this also means that the people who are testing, they don’t have to be physically next to the device? It all goes through the Internet?
Ranny : Yes, this is all performed remotely. The also opens up testing to more people, as we can just send the PCB, the harness, anyone can contribute their device to the testing. For example, if I have a device like the PinePhone, I could take a harness, and connect it to the testing devices. If someone else wants to test something on GitLab, but they don’t have a PinePhone, but I do, I can test for them. This makes it possible to test anywhere in the world, with anyone, with any phone. Even if you don’t have the phone yourself, you can test it out on someone else’s device.
Walid : It’s great because that’s a real problem. I just listened to a conference of people from Ubuntu Touch [FOSDEM 2024 The Journey to Ubuntu Touch 20.04 on PINE64] where they said that the problem was that if you don’t have the phone, you can’t make a port because you don’t have the phone physically at hand. So with this, you have solved the problem.
Antoine : To add, our testing infrastructure still remains rooted in the support of the volunteers on the testing team. As mentioned earlier, we have a testing team who coordinates testing on devices for a week of tests before each release. We also have, on the GitLab, a checklist to complete and where the maintainers of these devices are included. We are therefore able to really ensure that at the very least, the device is able to initialize. This is often when we find out that something got broken since the last version, and then we can put fixes in place before release. This is also where interfaces are tested more deliberately as the maintainers of the interface are able to test it and so are other people.
Ranny : Yep! Every time we release, we have a large group of people trying out the new version of postmarketOS and testing the device, interface, etc… Each release, it’s a big coordination between a lot of people to test it all and make sure that everything works.
Walid : So then how does it work, there’s like a freeze based off the edge version, and then you invite people to test it?
Antoine : Yes, so we freeze by forking the current state of Edge and then we invite people to test the image that comes out of this first release candidate. Then, we’ll make fixes and backport fixes to Edge. Generally, process lasts one to two weeks, sometimes a little longer, depending on whether there are really broken features that need to be solved.
PostmarketOS governance
Walid : We talked a bit about governance previously, but is there anything else you two would like to share?
Antoine : Sure, I could talk more about how we are evolving our governance structure for the future.
So we are trying to ensure that the project doesn’t end up being managed from a purely technical perspective, and do so in a democratic and accessible way. That’s partly why at the moment, we’re in the process of creating a non-profit organization within Belgium. We’re currently in the process of finishing our first version of our new charter. This work will also allow us to meet the obligations for EU grants, but also open up our membership base to people from the rest of the world.
So, we are in the process of integrating the current practice into a charter that is legally, obviously, re-enforceable with a board of directors to create, in the end, a kind of power shared between those who have technical capacity and technical experience to move things forward and a board of directors that is democratically accountable to the grassroots. And so, to avoid this issue that, at least personally, I’ve noticed in the ecosystem where, in the end, it’s more the people with the technical abilities who lead the project, that creates a context, a more meritocratic, technocratic structure, which is not in itself problematic. In the end, we want to make sure to stay true to our grassroots so we can fulfill our mission of freeing up our devices and the people who use them.
Walid : A quick question and remark. For the remark, for the listeners who are interested, we are talking about foundations or associations in Belgium and the particular role that non-profit organizations have and that kind of thing. You can listen to the episode on the Tryton project and also the episode on the Eclipse Foundation [and also the episode on the OpenRail Foundation]. There you go, I don’t say much more, but there are a lot of topics in there, on why Belgium, why it’s specific, etc…
My question is: have you been inspired or are you inspired, in terms of governance, by existing projects?
Antoine : Definitely! A lot of the research work, before working on the charter, comes from examples like FreeCAD, the GNOME Foundation and KDE. We are very much inspired by what is already being done there. And also, we’re looking to integrate some of our own governance innovations like the Trusted Contributor Program.
Walid : You didn’t talk about that program. What does it consist of? Ranny, maybe, do you want to say a few words about it? What is this “trusted contributors“?
Ranny : The Trusted Contributor is a program that, if you’ve worked enough in postmarketOS, allows you to submit a request through a formal process to be part of team. This is documented in our docs on postmarketos.org. This then allows for those on the team to contribute to the organization and administration of the project, and vote on project decisions.
Recently, we also flattened our existing structure, and removed the Core Contributors, so in the end now our whole team is entirely made of Trusted Contributors. The idea here is to make it more democratic, and make it easier for everyone to participate and make decisions.
The postmarketOS community
Walid : Let’s move forward a little bit, because there’s still a lot to say. I’d like to talk about the postmarketOS community and how you communicate to the community as well. First off, what do you know about your community? Are there places in the world where there are more people from the community?
Ranny : I would say in general, I feel like there are more people coming from Europe because there’s a larger culture around free software there. In the U.S., there are some free software movements on the west side, but I’ve found on the east coast the community isn’t very large. That being said, postmarketOS remains an extremely international project. I know very well that we have people in Japan, China, maybe, America of course, then in Europe and a few from South America. But certainly, anyone can join our community.
Walid : Do you have any events were the community meets up?
Ranny : Well in that case, I can say our big news which is: we are currently organizing a conference at the University of Aachen, Germany, from September 25th to 27th. We invite everyone to join us. Tickets are available online on our website. It’s the first time we’ve done our own conference.
But otherwise, we also usually meet every year at FOSDEM. We always have a hackathon that takes place in the days following FOSDEM to meet in addition and make decisions on the direction of the project. FOSDEM gives us a good opportunity to meet each other.
We also have quite a few project members who go to conferences individually. I know that recently, Luca and Pablo went to Nice, France for Embedded Recipes. Pablo did a talk on Hardware-CI. I myself will be at DefCon in Las Vegas in August. So, if you’re there feel free to stop by and say hello.
By the way, I’ll also mention, if you’re in the postmarketOS community, even if you’re not a member of the team, you can represent postmarketOS yourself at a conference. All we ask is to be respectful and respect the code of conduct. We can send you stickers to distribute, and that’s where I really emphasize, postmarketOS is a community project
Walid : Super interesting. Another the question I was asking myself is, for example, Luca, he works at Fairphone. Are there other people in the community who work for phone manufacturers or subcontractors? In short, are there people in the industry who, by the way, potentially have access to know-how, documents that can help, what?
Ranny : Apart from Luca, I don’t really know for postmarketOS. I know in some upstream projects, there are definitely people who are part of the industry. We also work with Sendero Linux, which is a small digital company that sells phones. So, if you want to buy a OnePlus 6 with postmarketOS already on it, you can go to Sendero Linux. But otherwise, as far as I know, no, not really. Of course, if there are people who are interested out there, we would love to get in contact.
Project communication
Walid : So as a project, how do you communicate? What social networks do you use? Do you have a newsletter? How do you organize yourself to communicate with your community?
Ranny : So things like announcements and information, we put them on Mastodon.
We also have a Lemmy, but I believe isn’t used much, but it exists. And then, of course, Matrix, where we do a lot of our development and user support. And then, every month we put out a monthly blog post that talks about everything that happened in the previous month in postmarketOS. It is mostly Ollie who writes it with people who help him.
And then, of course, we have our own postmarketOS podcasts (that needs more recordings!). This summer, I also want to try to do more podcast appearances and marketing for postmarketOS, so if there are other people who are interested in doing a podcast with us, write me a message. If you can find my email address on the team page.
Walid : a little clarification for people who might not know, Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit which is part of the Fediverse.
PostmarketOS Financing
Walid :So moving on to another large topic, financing. From what I gathered, everyone are volunteers. So who is funding postmarketOS? Antoine?
Antoine : Currently, everyone on the team is a volunteer. There is no permanent or permanent employees. All of our funding comes either from donations, automatic contributions from the community, or through grants.
Because of that, our funding is quite limited. Most of this gets budged into recurring infrastructure or other fixed costs, like events cost, etc…, as well as to subsidize projects so we can move forward on those more challenging specific projects.
All of this is managed on a platform called Open Collective, which is a collective budget management platform adhering to the principle of transparency. Everything is open, anyone can see our recurring or one time donation income, and can see how the money is being used.
That said, last year, we ended up with more donations than expected leading to a surplus. The way we decided to use this surplus is by creating our Contributor Support Program. This was more of an experiment. We wanted to see if from our surplus we could support our contributors who are already working on the project.
Many things have been worked on through this program, like a lot of governance work that has been led by Pablo [Correa Gómez],, or Clayton [Craft]‘s work on Duranium (a project aimed at making postmarketOS atomic and immutable) and Stefan [Hansson] on the pmbootstrap, on the development of tools, etc… These are just a few examples, but it’s something we’ve tried to do to free up more time for things when there are collective needs that the team identifies.
For now, the program has been paused as with a new increased budget in the new fiscal year, we no longer have a surplus of donations. Right now we are working on rethinking the program.
Walid : You also have donations from the NLnet Foundation.
Antoine : Yes, absolutely. Many of our team members apply for grants to NLnet. Last year, we had a major grant from NLnet. And then, we also made a grant application to the European Commission.
Walid : To our dear listeners/readers, if you’d like to learn more about NLNet, I invite you to go and listen to the episode I did with Lwenn from NLnet, which explains all this in detail. It’s quite exciting. So donations that allow you to free up people’s time to work on the project.
Antoine : Right.
Walid : Is the funding only European, or can you also go and get funding from other countries?
Antoine: Currently, the subsidies that we have sought are more European, simply because the European ecosystem is much more aligned with supporting open source projects. Unfortunately, in North America, we are quite behind in this regard.
Walid : We talked about it at the very beginning, in the introduction, but are there any projects with which you collaborate the most? I think, for example, in one of the previous episodes, Arnaud said that with Mobian, he was in a lot of contact with the people at postmarketOS. I also saw on Mastodon at the end of last year that the people at SailfishOS who worked on USB-C modes saw it get added by postmarketOS. How do you have great contributions with other projects?
Ranny : From the get-go, we have this policy of encouraging working upstream, which means that in a way, we really do collaborate a lot with other projects. For example, some people like Bart Ribbers, who is on our team has contributed upstream to Plasma-Mobile. Then, there are these projects, sometimes for like specific devices for like certain Snapdragon SoCs. Sometimes we also have more specific collaborations for example, the Hardware-CI was done with Martin [Roukala], for the CI-Tron. There are people like Rob Mader who work libcamera. So, since postmarketOS has so many upstream things, inevitably, we’re always working with others.
postmarketOS and industry
Walid : I wanted to know if you had any contact with the industry, like earlier, you said that there was a store in the United States or someone who provided phones with postmarketOS installed. Do you have any contact with phone manufacturers?
Ranny : yes, so, indeed, we have this partnership with Sendero Linux, which is an online store for the OnePlus 6. Then, I know that in the past, we had a program with Pine64, also Fairphone, thanks to Luca.
Otherwise, I know, from time to time, there are manufacturers who offer to send us their devices. There was a new device that appeared maybe six months or a year ago, I don’t know entirely, but they had offered to send devices to our developers.
We don’t have that many connections directly to phone manufacturers, but we welcome any of course. If you are interested, as always, send us a message.
Walid : I suggest we move on to the conclusion. Before giving you the last word, you had added in the topics, new user contribution. So, how, if I want to contribute, how do I contribute to postmarketOS?
How to contribute to postmarketOS
Ranny : So if you want to contribute, we have a lot of different places to contribute depending on what you want to do. If you want to do testing, you can join our testing team of which the details are on the wiki. Otherwise, you can go to the postmarketOS contribution page. There is also, for example, software packaging. So, if you’re interested in that, or things around hardware, Linux kernels, or drivers, if you’re a technical person, there are a lot of things to do.
For the less technical folks, right now, I’m trying to make non-technical contributions easier. Hopefully soon, we should have a section on our site for various tasks. These will be tasks such as marketing, communication, finance, governance.
Walid : Antoine, do you want to add anything?
Antoine : Yes. In fact, I think Ranny mentioned a lot of them, but we also invite financial contributions. If you think what we do is important, support us via Open Collective by doing a one-time or recurring donation. It’s only through that we can pay for our infrastructure and help fund projects like the hardware CI. And of course, also, give postmarketOS a try! Install it on your phone or your device, to see if it works or if it doesn’t, report any bugs so that we can fix them!
Final Words
Walid : I’ll leave you both a final word. If you want to send an additional message or say something to the listeners before we leave. Antoine, do you want to start?
Antoine : Yes, I haven’t prepared a final word, but I wanted to thank you Walid for welcoming us in this way. I could share a little bit my feelings about postmarketOS: I came back in December, so it’s only been six months since I’ve been in the project. But I’m very, very impressed personally with the project and I invite support in any form: not only at the technical level, we have people who really have expertise as I think you can see through our different projects, but I’m very impressed by the governance work, the reflexes that there are. One thing that we do not see enough of in our environment is that we tend to deal with social problems with technical solutions. It’s a bit of a bias that we have by being more technical people.
But I see here a project that doesn’t just do that, that doesn’t just deal with a social problem. Here we could say the problem, it’s Google, then monopolies and all that, then all the power relations that come with it. But we don’t just treat it as a technical problem, but we also offer social solutions, through the way we organize ourselves. I, in any case, find it very inspiring. And if there are various professionals who want to get into it, I’m not a computer scientist, I’m a sociologist. Well, I took a break from my master’s degree, but, I’m going to call myself a sociologist, I’m going to dare to say that. In any case, I’d like to believe that Ranny and I are proof that you don’t need to be a computer scientist or a computer scientist by training to advance a project of this kind. So that’s my motivational word: free yourself from the GAFAMs (FANNG)!
Walid : Ranny, your last word.
Ranny : Yes, thank you again for having us, Walid, on the podcast! Try postmarketOS, if you’re interested. Share it with friends. If you want to contribute, send us a message on Matrix or find a task to do. We have a lot of things to do, technical and non-technical, as we said.
With that there’s the phrase that Ollie always likes to say at the end of meetings, which is: “happy hacking!”
Walid : Great! Listen, thank you very much. I have to tell you that I’m a big fan and I talk about it all the time to everyone. I always have my phone to show it to people, and I find it really exciting. If we put in the time and money to do so, it could perhaps answer the question of what are we going to do the day Android closes down?
That’s why I think it’s important to do this series, to talk to all the people who make Linux distributions for phones, to try to understand each one of what they do, what the differences are, where they are, so that people can get an idea of where we are, are we far away, or are we not far from having an everyday phone running Linux.
I was very eager to talk to you so thank you both very much. For our listeners/readers, I invite you to try it if you have a phone and you don’t know what to do with it and it is supported. You have nothing to lose except some time trying to flash, test, etc. I started with the KDE Plasma Mobile and then afterward, while talking to the people at FOSDEM, he told me “ah, you should still try Phosh” and indeed, with Phosh, I found it quite enjoyable.
Listen, Ranny, Antoine, thank you very much. I’m really delighted. I hope to have the opportunity to have you on the podcast again in a few moments to tell us where you are. Until then, thank you again very much for you and the time you took to come and talk about postmarketOS.
Episode production
- Remote recording on June 1st, 2026
- Basis: Walid Nouh
- Editing: Walid Nouh
- Transcript: Ranny Bergamotte (a huge thank you!)
Use of AI
You can consult our AI charter.
Production:
- Noise reduction in Audacity via OpenVino and the DeepNetFilter2 model
- Transcription: whisper-medium via mufidiwiwhi locally
- Transcription improvement: gemma4-26b locally via internal tool
Publication:
- English translation of social media posts: locally with Jan and Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct
- Research of sources around Radxa and an Ubuntu Touch conference: Perplexity
License
This podcast is released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license or later