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Welcome to your new FOSSphones News Roundup, our second one so far of 2025.
This roundup was supposed to be posted at the end of February, but I've been out of town visiting family with my wife, so we're doing an early March roundup instead! We've heard from a few of our favorite FOSS mobile projects in some updates since last the last roundup, and we have some new things to cover. This includes a call to action for testing the OTA-8 release of Ubuntu Touch, a Q1-2025 check-in from both Mobian and postmarketOS, a new CalyxOS release, and a new release of Phosh.
So, what are we waiting for? Without further ado, let's dive right into this roundup and see what's new!
Anyone familiar with the concept of Linux phones has heard of Ubuntu Touch, originally pioneered by Canonical and then taken over by the Ubports team after Canonical shuttered the project. It shipped on a few phones back in the 2010s, it ships as an optional operating system for some devices, such as the PinePhone Ubports Community Edition, Volla Phone and the f(x)tec Pro, with support for a bunch of other devices as well.
Ubuntu Touch has always been one of my favorite mobile distros, and the Ubports team has recently announced a call for testing of the newest iteration of the Ubuntu Touch operating system, 20.04 OTA-8.
What's new in Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-8?
The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 release is considered a maintenance release of the 20.04 series. Being a more minimal release, it won't be packed with brand new features, but it does bring with it some bugfixes and QoL upgrades that are always welcome.
Here are some of the biggest things users will notice while using OTA-8:
When is OTA-8 releasing?
Ubuntu Touch's OTA-8 dropped onn February 28. Got a device that supports Ubuntu Touch and want to give it a shot? With all these updates coming along, every new release is an even better time to think about checking it out on your own phone!
If you want to read the entire announcement from the Ubports Team, check out the full scoop at this link for a deeper dive.
Mobian is probably a name you're familiar with if you've been hanging around FOSSphones for awhile, as it is probably my favorite mobile Linux distribution. I already run Debian everywhere from my desktop, laptops, and servers, so it seemed like it would make all kinds of sense to run on my Linux phones as well. Mobian is a fine mobile distribution, and I was glad to see lately that the Mobian Team has outlined their plans going forward in 2025 for the distro.
In a new post on the Mobian blog, we got a look back at the last few months as well as the roadmap for 2025. The post is chock-full of updates, so we're going to take a quick look at some of the highlights, as usual.
Aiming for a 'device-specific apps only' software repository
The Mobian team notes that thanks to the involvement of upstream projects accepting or writing patches to their applications, ensuring their usability on mobile devices, the main Debian repository now has a good amount of adaptive GNOME and KDE software that can be used comfortably on both desktop and mobile devices.
This has allowed Mobian to drop almost all of the apps they were distributing through their own package repo. These included Evince, which has been replaced by Papers. Loupe has replaced Eye of GNOME, and the main camera application used is now Snapshot, all of these are now available in the main Debian repo.
GNOME Text Editor is noted to now be working decently on mobile devices, as well as GNOME Software and GNOME Settings.
The team plans on removing the remaining applications before the Trixie release, which include Millipixels (the Librem 5 camera application), which is being replaced by Megapixels v2 when it lands in the Debian archive. wake-mobile is due to be dropped as it is no longer actively maintained, and there are .deb packages from upstream available, anyway.
The team notes that it plans to keep maintaining a patched version of GTK3 until Phosh is ported to GTK4, meaning all packages in the Mobian repo will be Mobian-specific and hardware support packages.
A new greeter
The Mobian team notes that back when the project started, no mobile-friendly greeter existed, and so they were going to take a stab at hacking Phosh and creating one, since it was meant to run on a Wayland compositor, had a lockscreen that could be developed into a login screen, and had touch input and keyboard management already.
Eventually, the team had stripped a lot of functionality, keeping the core and lockscreen features, and called it phog. It worked well, and became a part of Mobian, leaving cleanups and refactoring for a later point in time. The team notes that while the greeter worked fine, it proved to be a "maintenance nightmare", and phog wasn't updated for awhile as the team worked on other things.
Eventually, a community member (@samcday) came along inspired by this effort the Mobian team made, took unmodified Phosh code, using its core functionality as a shared library, and ensuring libphosh had a decent API, added some Rust bindings and created a greeter called Phrog.
Phrog is now part of the main Debian repo and is going to be used as the main greeter in Mobian as soon as it makes it way to the testing repo. The Mobian team notes that this will reduce the amount of tech-debt they have to deal with going forward.
Supporting more devices with Mobian
The team put a lot of work in ensuring Qualcomm-based devices can be supported using packages present in Debian. Because of these efforts, the only Mobian-specific packages needed are the device kernels. Since this work was done, the Mobian project has added a few new supported devices:
If you have one of these devices, you can now give Mobian a shot on them!
What's coming up next?
The team also had a little "what's next?" section in the update, mentioning that due to low dev bandwidth, they didn't get quite as much knocked out in the 2024 roadmap as they'd have liked, and some of those items will be addressed after the next stable release. For now, the team is going to be focused on bugfixes in preparation for the release of Debian Trixie.
The team also mentions they will be participating in this year's Google Summer of Code, with their proposal for improving device tweaks management in Debian being approved. The team also plans to attend DebConf'25 in Brest, France, so you might get to say hi to some of the team if you plan on attending!
Get the full scoop
This is just a small peek, of course, at the full post from the Mobian Team, and as usual, I encourage you to read the whole thing to catch up on anything that we might have missed.
postmarketOS is a well-known mobile Linux distro that aims to support all kinds of devices, helping stop e-waste and keep devices going with an up-to-date operating system as long as possible.
I have the postmarketOS Community Edition Pinephone, and have always enjoyed trying out new things that make their way to postmarketOS quickly, such as newer versions of Phosh, GNOME Mobile, Plasma Mobile, and sxmo. Like Mobian and Ubuntu Touch, I'm always happy to see new updates coming out that I can test out and see what's fresh with them.
If you haven't messed with postmarketOS before, it also has pmbootstrap, a very handy tool for building customized images of postmarketOS for your own testing and usage, with your choice of desktop environment and other cool stuff. Try building a custom postmarketOS image sometime with pmbootstrap and see what you think about it!
With all that in mind, let's begin getting into this new update from the postmarketOS team and see what has been new! Like the Mobian update, this one is quite big, so we are going to be going through the main highlights.
systemd has been merged into edge
Announced in an update almost a year ago, systemd has made its way into postmarketOS.
The systemd packages are placed into a separate repo, so that users can continue using openRC instead if they so choose. However, the postmarketOS team notes that some of the major mobile desktop environmens such as GNOME Mobile, Phosh, and Plasma Mobile will run better with systemd, so they encourage making the switch.
a more mobile-friendly Thunderbird
Just like the desktop version of Firefox got a bit of a mobile makeover with mobile-config-firefox on swaths of mobile Linux distributions, the awesome free software email application, Thunderbird, now has a more mobile-friendly look with mobile-config-thunderbird.
mobile-config-thunderbird can be found in postmarketOS edge. If you are on stable, the team notes the package can be backported on demand, and you can also install it directly from the git repo. If you like, you are also free to run it on other mobile Linux distributions, if you so choose.
Lomiri makes its way back to postmarketOS edge
Lomiri, the desktop environment project from our friends at Ubports that aims to revive Canonical's Unity, which used to be the default desktop experience on Ubuntu, has made its way back into postmarketOS edge repos.
For awhile, due to libraries and frameworks that Lomiri was dependent on being different in Alpine compared to what the Ubuntu Touch team was using, Lomiri was removed from the master branch and moved into a feature branch in postmarketOS. Thankfully, in 2025, the situation is much different, and the gap of library versions between the two projects are much smaller now, the postmarketOS team notes. Due to most Lomiri-related packages being upstreamed to Alpine, Lomiri is now a usable mobile desktop option on postmarketOS again. So, if you're wanting that 'Unity' feel on your phone and you run postmarketOS, you can now use it once again!
pmbootstrap updates
pmbootstrap is a tool that allows you to create custom images of postmarketOS. It is now on its 3.2.0 release, and with it, some new changes have been introduced! Note that this release or newer is required for building systemd-enabled images.
Here are some of the main updates to pmbootstrap to keep in mind:
pmbootstrap install --android-recovery-zip has been fixed.Newly supported devices
postmarketOS now supports some new devices! Here's the list:
If you have one of these supported devices and want to try out Linux, consider giving postmarketOS a shot on it!
...and even more!
There was a host of other things mentioned in the update by the postmarketOS team, including new stuff in pmaports, misc. news, a future roadmap, some artwork and homepage updates, and more! We won't get into all of it here since it was such a massive update, so make sure you check out the other stuff the team has been up to at the link below!
Catch the whole update from the postmarketOS Team by reading the full post so you can catch up on any details we might have missed.
CalyxOS, the FOSS Android distribution available for Pixels and some other devices, has been rolling out with its new update, 6.4.2, over the last few days, bringing with it Android 15, better accessibility features, Android Auto support, the usual bugfixes and improvements, and more goodies.
A good amount of changes were implemented here, and we're going to cover the devices this update is rolling out to, when the update came to the devices, and some of the highlights from the update itself. Let's get into it!
Which devices are supported by calyxOS 6.4.2?
If you have any of the following devices, you can run this CalyxOS 6.4.2:
~ For an entire list of devices supported by calyxOS, please check here.
When did the update begin rolling out?
As usual, calyxOS has a few update channels, and when your device gets the update depends on which one you're on. Over the last week, the update started hitting their respective channels:
- Beta channel received the update on February 22, Saturday.
- Security express channel received the update on February 24, Monday.
- Stable channel received the update on February 27, Thursday.
If you're on a supported device and ready to check out the new bits, check for updates! By the time you read this, it will have rolled out to all channels.
What are some of the new changes in this update?
There are a good amount of updates to go over from calyxOS 6.4.2. Here are some of the highlights:
See the full list of changes, supported devices and other details at this post from the CalyxOS Team.
As normal, there is some news ready for the new release of Phosh, the mobile Linux desktop environment built on the GNOME stack. This release, 0.45.0, on February 15, 2025.
We will go over the changes to Phosh itself, as well as a few of its core components, including phoc, phosh-mobile-settings, and phosh-tour.
~ Phosh updates
libphosh API has been minimalized and stabilized.You can read the full changelog for Phosh here.
~ Phoc updates
PhocViewChild and PhocView a little more 'boring'.You can read the full changelog for Phoc here.
~ Phosh Mobile Settings updates
You can read the full changelog for Phosh Mobile Settings here.
~ Phosh Tour updates
You can read the full changelog for Phosh Tour here.
This was quite the update, and Phosh is quite consistent in their updates, with one being always ready at a time for a roundup! I have loved watching this mobile Linux environment grow and continue to get more usage and exposure, so you can bet we'll be covering the next update as well!
If you've been running Phosh on your own mobile Linux device, make sure you download these updates so you can get the latest bits! It just keeps getting better and better. If you want to read this update in its entirety straight from the Phosh Team, you can check out this post for the low-down!
On every FOSSphones News Roundup, we always try to do our other consistent section - the FOSSphones App Highlights. This is where we shine the spotlight on some of the FOSS mobile apps we've been using, whether they're on proper Linux mobile, or on Android devices.
Here are a few of the apps I've been using since the last roundup.
Got a cool FOSS mobile app you've been using (or building)? Let us know about it so we can give it some time in the spotlight! If you've discovered a cool FOSS mobile apps that we haven't covered here yet, let us know about it by reaching out to us on our email or our social media accounts, and we will check it out and highlight it here in a future roundup.
Well, that's about it - another FOSSphones News Roundup already in the history books. We've seen some cool new releases in this month, and some new announcements from some of our favorite projects on what they've been up to since the new year began, and what some of the plans are going to be for the projects moving forward. We're already three months into 2025, and things are looking good for some of our favorite mobile FOSS projects.
Until later on this month, hope you're well, and we will see you in the next roundup!