postmarketOS 23.12 Brings the GNOME 45 Desktop to Linux Phones and Tablets

postmarketOS 23.12 has been released today as the latest stable update to this Alpine Linux-based operating system for mobile devices introducing new features, support for new devices, and other enhancements.

Based on the recently released Alpine Linux 3.19, postmarketOS 23.12 is here to introduce support for Chromebook devices, including the Samsung Chromebook 2 11.6″, Samsung Chromebook, Google Gru Chromebooks, Google Kukui Chromebooks, Google Oak Chromebooks, Google Trogdor Chromebooks, Google Veyron Chromebooks, as well as other Google Chromebooks with a 64-bit processor.

Also supported in this release are several mobile devices from Xiaomi, including the Xiaomi Mi A1, Xiaomi Redmi 4 Prime, Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, and Xiaomi Redmi S2/Y2. In addition, postmarketOS 23.12 introduces support for the ODROID-XU4 single-board computer. With this, postmarketOS is now supported on a total of 45 devices.

postmarketOS 23.12 also supports the latest GNOME 45 (GNOME Shell on Mobile) desktop environment series, along with KDE Plasma 5.27.10 LTS, Phosh 0.33, and Sxmo 1.15.1. One thing to note is that the default image viewer in the GNOME and Phosh editions was changed from Eye of GNOME to Loupe.

Other noteworthy changes include unlocking encrypted installations through unl0kr by default, NCM (Network Configuration Manager) is now used as the default USB networking gadget instead of RNDIS (Remote NDIS), additional safety checks have been added to the upgrade process to make it more robust, and the installation images for PinePhone (Pro), Librem 5, and Pinebook Pro have been removed.

“We used to provide these as a convenient method to install postmarketOS encrypted without building your own image,” said the postmarketOS devs. “A rewrite of the installer code has been in progress for quite some time, with the goal to support more devices and to have a more automated testing. The new code base is not ready yet however, and due to regressions with the old code base it was not feasible to keep the installer images for v23.12.”

With that in mind, you can download and install the postmarketOS 23.12 release right now from the official website. Users of postmarketOS 23.06 can upgrade their installations following the instructions provided by the devs here.

For further reading, check out the release announcement page to get a glimpse of all the supported devices in this release, as well as for other details about the new changes and known issues.

Image credits: postmarketOS (edited by Marius Nestor)

Last updated 4 months ago