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It’s been six months after postmarketOS 21.06, so it’s time for another hefty update that brings support for more devices, the latest mobile desktop environments, improvements, bug fixes, and up-to-date components. Here is postmarketOS 21.12, based on Alpine Linux 3.15.
The wait is over, and the great news is that you can now install postmarketOS on nine new devices, including the Arrow DragonBoard 410c, ODROID HC2, and RockPro64 development boards, PineBook Pro laptop, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 and Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7 tablets, as well as Lenovo A6000, Lenovo A6010, and Xiaomi Pocophone F1 smartphones. On the other hand, the new release drops support for the Nokia N900 smartphone.
Probably the main attraction is PINE64’s PineBook Pro ARM laptop, which now has official postmarketOS images with different interfaces, including the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktops, as well as Sway, Phosh, and Console interfaces.
postmarketOS 21.12 ships with the usual mobile-optimized Phosh (GNOME), KDE Plasma Mobile, and Sxmo interfaces. As expected, these have been updated to support the latest and greatest upstream releases.
For example, the GNOME-based Phosh interface now supports the latest GNOME 41 apps, the Plasma Mobile UI is now backed by the latest Plasma Mobile Gear 21.12 software suite, and the Sxmo interface has been ported to Wayland.
New features in this release include TTYescape, a handy tool that uses hardware keys on devices with a physical keyboard to quickly send you to a second TTY so you can launch an on-screen keyboard. This is useful when you need to perform recovery from situations where your only choice was to force reboot the device. TTYescape works with all three interfaces, KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh, and Sxmo.
Other than that, postmarketOS Tweaks has been updated to version 0.9.0, a release that lets you control the app drawer filter in the Phosh interface and promises much-improved battery life on devices that can go into deep sleep if setting the suspend timeout, which now defaults to 2 minutes.
Also updated are the postmarketos-mkinitfs boot file generator tool, which is now more reliable when updating the kernel and initramfs, as well as the mobile-config-firefox tool, which now features a bottom navigation bar and ships with the uBlock Origin add-on installed by default.
postmarketOS 21.12 is available for download from the official website for a total of 23 officially supported devices. Of course, this is for new installations as existing postmarketOS users can perform an upgrade following these instructions.
Apart from the newly added devices mentioned above, you can also install postmarketOS on ASUS MeMo Pad 7, BQ Aquaris X5, Motorola Moto G4 Play, OnePlus 6, OnePlus 6T, PinePhone, PineTab, Purism Librem 5, Samsung Galaxy A3 (2015), Samsung Galaxy A5 (2015), Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Value Edition, Wileyfox Swift, Xiaomi Mi Note 2, and Xiaomi Redmi 2.
Image credits: postmarketOS (edited by Marius Nestor)
Last updated 2 years ago
