The year is coming to a close. As always, it is the time to reflect and to get the second stable postmarketOS release of the year done. postmarketOS v23.12 is based on the excellent Alpine Linux 3.19. Besides upgrading everything to new versions, for the first time we have support for a lot of Chromebooks and MSM8953-based Xiaomi devices!

v23.12, like previous releases, is geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts as explained in our article state of postmarketOS.

Supported Devices

The amount of supported devices has been increased to 45 (from 31 since v23.06).

postmarketOS v23.12 can be used to breathe new life into the Samsung Chromebook 2 11.6" and many other Chromebooks for the first time!

A typical gathering of MSM8953 devices running postmarketOS v23.12.

• ASUS MeMO Pad 7
• Arrow DragonBoard 410c
• BQ Aquaris X5
• Fairphone 4
• Google Chromebooks with x64 CPU new
• Google Gru Chromebooks new
• Google Kukui Chromebooks new
• Google Oak Chromebooks new
• Google Trogdor Chromebooks new
• Google Veyron Chromebooks new
• Lenovo A6000
• Lenovo A6010
• Motorola Moto G4 Play
• Nokia N900
• ODROID XU4 new
• OnePlus 6
• OnePlus 6T
• PINE64 PinePhone
• PINE64 PinePhone Pro
• PINE64 Pinebook Pro
• PINE64 RockPro64
• Purism Librem 5
• SHIFT6mq
• Samsung Chromebook new
• Samsung Chromebook 2 11.6" new
• Samsung Galaxy A3 (2015)
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2015)
• Samsung Galaxy E7
• Samsung Galaxy Grand Max
• Samsung Galaxy S III (GT-I9300 and SHW-M440S)
• Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Value Edition
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0"
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1"
• Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0
• Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7
• Wileyfox Swift
• Xiaomi Mi A1 new
• Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite new
• Xiaomi Mi Note 2
• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
• Xiaomi Redmi 2
• Xiaomi Redmi 4 Prime new
• Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus new
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 new
• Xiaomi Redmi S2/Y2 new

The ODROID HC2 is not available in v23.12 anymore. It can still be used with postmarketOS edge. If you are interested in getting it back into the stable release, the first step would be you stepping up to maintain the port - let us know in the issues or chat.

User Interfaces

• GNOME Shell on Mobile 45_git20230908 replaces 44_git20230405 from v23.06

• Phosh 0.33 replaces version 0.30 from v23.06 SP1.

• Plasma 5.27.10 replaces version 5.27.8 from v23.06.

• Sxmo 1.15.1 replaces version 1.14.0 from v23.06.

Notable Changes

• Unlocking of encrypted installations is now done with unl0kr by default, the successor to osk-sdl (more).

• The default USB networking gadget was changed from RNDIS to NCM (more).

• The default image viewer in Phosh and GNOME is now Loupe, instead of previously Eye of GNOME (EoG) (more)

• The release upgrade process has been made more robust. There are additional safety checks for a too small boot partition and for having hardcoded versions or packages installed via mrtest. Additionally a bug was fixed that caused Alpine mirrors without /alpine/ in the URL to not get properly replaced during the upgrade.

• Installation images have been removed. We used to provide these for the PinePhone (Pro), Librem 5 and Pinebook Pro as a convenient method to install postmarketOS encrypted without building your own image with pmbootstrap first, and to install from micro SD cards to the internal storage. 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. So it was decided to adjust the installation instructions in the wiki for the affected devices to explain how the same types of installations can be accomplished without the installer images for v23.12.

• ZRAM can be enabled via the following command. We plan to enable it automatically once it is more tested in edge (!4598).

# rc-update add zram-init default

Testing And Known Issues

A huge thank you to device maintainers and the testing team, and people who spontaneously decided to take part in testing this new release (#2409) and fixing bugs right before finalizing it! If you would like to join the fun next time, add yourself to the Testing Team.

Notable regressions:

• #15: we got one report of getting stuck at boot with unsupported 'crypto_LUKS' filesystem. This was after upgrading a PinePhone install with FDE. If you are also affected, please report back and see the issue for workarounds.
• #2434: shift-axolotl: boot fails with FDE
• #2407: shift-axolotl: audio profiles broken

Notable issues with new device ports:

• #2435: google-oak: audio is broken
• #2375: google-veyron: USB port dead after resume/wakeup

How To Get It

New Installation

For new installs, see download and make sure to read the wiki page for your device.

Upgrade

For existing installations, see the upgrade to a newer postmarketOS release wiki article.

Recommended manual steps after upgrading:

The Road Ahead

Members of the postmarketOS community and wider Linux Mobile scene can be found at 37C3 and FOSDEM 2024 (see the related stand and devroom). We have a lot of plans for postmarketOS for 2024 and beyond, towards making it more reliable and more! To accelerate that development, consider contributing or making a donation.

A Community Effort

A big thanks to everybody who contributed to postmarketOS, to Alpine or to any of the numerous upstream components we use — without you this would not be possible!