Flashes

postmarketOS is finally coming to wearables

Almost four years after its first release, postmarketOS has just started targeting the valuable niche of smartwatches. As the upper end of these devices tends to offer near-identical hardware configurations

Flashes

The RUHAcam is an open-source, 3D-printed Linux camera based on Raspberry Pi

In spite of its very different appearence, this project actually shares a lot with our usually covered mobile Linux devices. Firstly, because it is a fully open-source (and open hardware-ish)

Linux Kernel

Tens of Nvidia Tegra devices now run mainline Linux thanks to the "grate" project

Nvidia chips and the Linux community have not always been known for a friendly attitude between each other. In a famous talk by Linus Torvalds, which may appear slightly too

Linux Tablets

The JingPad A1 is a Linux tablet with 2K display, pen input, 5G and much more

Update 04/2021: More information on specs and hardware, pre-orders, see gallery belowSome months after the initial announcement, the first JingOS device has been officially announced. The device has been

RISC-V

MIPS Technologies joins RISC-V, moves to open-source ISA standard

The MIPS silicon manufacturer is one of the oldest RISC chip manufacturers, used in several systems since the late 80s. Characterized by clean and efficient designs, allowing adaption in varied

Flashes

Manjaro ships Plasma Mobile 5.21, adds initial setup for PinePhone

The popular Arch-based Manjaro distribution has been one of the earliest projects to express interest in the niche of Linux phones, and has been widely adopted by PinePhone users since

Wearables

Google just made sideloading Android Wear apps harder

Android Wear smartwatches are an extremely common breed of wearables. Being full of features and comparatively cheap, it is increasingly common to spot them on people's wrists. While the OS

Opinion

How anonymity overshadows real online privacy

Let's imagine that today you visited several places in a heavily video-surveilled city, while wearing a mask. Nobody knew your name or your real identity, but everyone knew what you

Linux Smartphone

New project aims to bring Linux mobile devices back to the mainstream market

A project that has recently got the attention of many FOSS journalists is the JingOS Linux distribution, coming from China and offering an explicitly "iPadOS-style" user interface according to its

GNOME "Text Editor" app is a mobile-friendly, GTK4 alternative to Gedit

Edit 03/2021: GNOME Text Editor has been officially announced by its author, and re-ported to the GTK4 toolkit as initially planned. It can be installed via the Flatpak gnome-nightly

postmarketOS

Linux on your smartphone: everything you need to know in 2021

One of the main issues with modern smartphones is the extremely short lifespan of this category of devices, which makes even high-end ones painfully slow within years. In fact, studies

Linux on iPhones

Can the Apple M1 run Linux?

UPDATE: It looks like a developer set up a Patreon for bringing Linux to the Apple M1. Although this is unlikely to be a one-man job, supporting his work may

Flashes

⚡ Plasma Mobile gets major UI improvements, several bugfixes

From being one of the earliest desktops to embrace the mobile Linux world, Plasma Mobile has already become one of the stablest and most complete mobile desktop environments thanks to continuous work by its team. What looked like a pre-alpha experiment years ago is

GTK

Building responsive Linux mobile apps with libhandy 1.0 and Gtk3

November 2020: This tutorial is being updated to reflect the minor API and configuration changes in libhandy 1.0, which is the upcoming version. Thanks to Martin Chang (@marty188586) for

RISC-V

Precursor is a RISC-V, FPGA-assisted open hardware PDA aimed at developers and hackers

A week or so after the launch of the extremely ambitious FXTec Pro-1 Android/Linux phone, sporting a hardware QWERTY keyboard and the highest-end specifications seen on a Linux phone

Flashes

⚡ Ubuntu Touch is coming to the Google Pixel 3a

After Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 adding official support for a series of Oneplus (3/3T) and Sony Xperia (X*, XZ) devices, the most popular Linux distribution for phones is expanding further,

Flashes

⚡ Official PinePhone back cover will add hardware keyboard, wireless charging, NFC and more

Just days after announcing the PineCom PDA, the PINE team has released another blog post (link below) announcing their progress for October 2020. This includes several plans, such as the

PINE64

PINE64 to launch PineCom, a cheaper, modem-free PinePhone-like PDA

The first PinePhone, initially launched (more or less) as a cheaper alternative to the Librem 5, gained enormous success thanks to continuous efforts by both software developers and the team,

Flashes

⚡ The status of camera on the PinePhone: drivers, autofocus, color curves and more

After many months of work, omnipresent postmarketOS developer and photography enthusiast Martijn Braam has worked on turning the PinePhone camera not only into something working, but pushing the boundaries of the entry-level OV5640 sensor and its basic lens. Image quality improvements for the #PinePhone

Flashes

⚡ Official "Fedora Mobility" project targets PinePhone (and more)

After several years of inactivity, the official Fedora Mobility SIG team has been revived to work on bringing the popular Linux distro to the PinePhone in the immediate future, but also aims for expansion to other devices in the future. This interest may be

Flashes

⚡ WhatsApp and Anbox: the most popular messaging app now runs on Linux phones

As seen in several previous articles, almost all tuxphone-oriented distributions are actively working on supporting the Anbox abstraction layer in order to integrate Android apps quasi-natively with Linux ones. With Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, PureOS and Mobian supporting it, the project is getting a new

Linux on Android smartphones

Using a Google Nexus 5 as a Linux phone, in 2020

One of the main objectives of Linux is to give new life to older devices, and many projects are proving this by running (somewhat) modern UIs even on ancient smartphones

Librem5

Purism announces Android app support for the Librem 5

While the Purism Librem 5 may not be getting the same level of attention it was during its early crowdfunding phase, its developers seem to be working harder than ever

PinePhone

Exploting pogo pins: PinePhone gets modular

Modular phones have been hypothesized for years, with Phonebloks and Project Ara being the most popular concepts and just some shy experiments, like Fairphone 2, LG G5, Motorola Moto Z

PinePhone

PinePhone adds postmarketOS CE and higher-spec'd "convergence" variants to their line-up

After the PinePhone "BraveHeart" (hardware 1.1) and the first Community Edition (1.2), Pine64 has released a new revision of their popular Linux phone, as announced in their July