postmarketOS // v26.06: Alpen AvocadoThe postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference will take place from September 25-27 in Aachen, Germany — Learn more!<br>v26.06: Alpen Avocado<br>June 21, 20268 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.<br>Introduction<br>That's right, we have a new naming scheme for our releases! Instead of the Friends-inspired "The One With…", we are now using an alliteration of the new wallpaper name (Alpen) and a fruit (🥑). The reason is that the previous scheme didn't always work, since new releases are time-based snapshots of Edge, and may not always have that one important feature to name the whole release after. Six months of work in upstream projects and in the postmarketOS community can often not be encapsulated in this format. So instead of "The One Where The Saga Continues, Part II", here is "Alpen Avocado"!<br>Software Stack<br>As always we target the most recent Alpine release. In case of v26.06 it is the excellent Alpine Linux 3.24.<br>User Interfaces (UIs)<br>Mobile UI Versions<br>GNOME 50 replaces GNOME 49 from v25.12. The mobile variant stays on 48.mobile.0 for this release, but has received important fixes by Cédric in !8798 (fix for a crash and for busy looping in some scenarios). A question that regularly comes up is whether the mobile variant can be fully merged into upstream. Significant parts have already been upstreamed over the past years (most notably the new gesture framework), but there is still a lot left to do, and more contributors are needed to make this happen. If you are interested in improving GNOME Mobile, such as helping to upstream the rest and, in the meantime, help out with rebasing on new GNOME versions, then join the GNOME Mobile matrix channel. Thanks to Cédric and all the GNOME contributors!

KDE Plasma Mobile 6.6.5 replaces version 6.5.6 from v25.12. Thanks to Devin, Bhushan, Andrew, Bart and all the KDE contributors!

Phosh 0.55.0 replaces version 0.51.0 from v25.12. Stefan managed to reduce the number of settings apps we ship with Phosh by integrating relevant parts of the old postmarketOS tweaks app into Phosh Mobile Settings. Joel, Jane, Clayton, Achill, Vasiliy, Arnav, Rob, Juan-Rafael and Piotr worked together to finish the long-standing effort of switching from our custom display manager tinydm to what Phosh upstream recommends, greetd and phrog (!6106). Thanks to Guido and all the Phosh contributors!

Sxmo stays on the fine 1.18.1 release. Thanks to Willow, Anjan, Maarten, ArenM and all the Sxmo contributors!

Other Notable Changes

New boot animation

systemd 261 replaces 257 from v25.12. Thanks to Aelin, Clayton and the systemd developers!

Booting has been made more appealing by switching from pbsplash to Plymouth and updating the splash screen. Visually, you get three segments of the logo fading out and back in, and on the functional side it is now possible to press ESC (or power on phones) to get the boot log and we can finally rotate the splash screen on devices where it looks wrong otherwise. Implementing this was great teamwork by Clayton, Aster, Brady, Rob, Ferass, Hakşiye, Mirthe, bluebunny and Sicelo!

Another booting-related feature and part of a larger effort to make pmOS more accessible is that devices with working vibration can now vibrate on boot (!7563). Some devices still have missing modules in the initramfs for working vibration. For those devices and for those that cannot vibrate, this is a no-op. If you are interested in making postmarketOS more accessible, join the related chat (Matrix, IRC). Thanks to Ferass, Aster, Clayton, Casey!

The generic kernel packages linux-postmarketos-{mainline,stable,lts} are part of v26.06 and will be upgraded and kept up-to-date as long as v26.06 is supported. Thanks, Aelin!

Plasma Bigscreen is available again with this release (!8141)! This UI had been disabled in postmarketOS since v24.06 as it was not compatible with Plasma 6. Thanks, Bart and upstream contributors!

Plasma desktop is now using plasma-login-manager instead of sddm for the systemd variant (!8079). Using OpenRC with Plasma in postmarketOS is not recommended anymore. While it may still work, this use case is not maintained and will be disabled in the near future. "Someone can step up and take over maintenance of Plasma with OpenRC if they care though." Thanks, Bart!

v26.06 contains a ModemManager upgrade that brings new features like cell broadcast. Thanks to Guido, Achill and the ModemManager maintainers (Aleksander et al.).

New postmarketOS installations use sudo-rs instead of doas by default. Thanks Aster!

We did the usual wallpaper poll and are happy to announce that Alpen won this time — another beautiful wallpaper by dikasp that got an impressive 285/557 votes and comments like "i like 'alpen' because it is a reference to alpine :)". Find previous wallpapers...