This release is geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts. We are working hard on stability improvements and automated testing, but if you expect Android or iOS levels of polish, then this is not for you yet.
Introduction
That's right, we have a new naming scheme for our releases! Instead of the Friends-inspired "The One With…", we are now using an alliteration of the new wallpaper name (Alpen) and a fruit (🥑). The reason is that the previous scheme didn't always work, since new releases are time-based snapshots of Edge, and may not always have that one important feature to name the whole release after. Six months of work in upstream projects and in the postmarketOS community can often not be encapsulated in this format. So instead of "The One Where The Saga Continues, Part II", here is "Alpen Avocado"!
Software Stack
As always we target the most recent Alpine release. In case of v26.06 it is the excellent Alpine Linux 3.24.
User Interfaces (UIs)
Mobile UI Versions
GNOME 50 replaces GNOME 49 from v25.12. The mobile variant stays on 48.mobile.0 for this release, but has received important fixes by Cédric in !8798 (fix for a crash and for busy looping in some scenarios). A question that regularly comes up is whether the mobile variant can be fully merged into upstream. Significant parts have already been upstreamed over the past years (most notably the new gesture framework), but there is still a lot left to do, and more contributors are needed to make this happen. If you are interested in improving GNOME Mobile, such as helping to upstream the rest and, in the meantime, help out with rebasing on new GNOME versions, then join the GNOME Mobile matrix channel. Thanks to Cédric and all the GNOME contributors!
KDE Plasma Mobile 6.6.5 replaces version 6.5.6 from v25.12. Thanks to Devin, Bhushan, Andrew, Bart and all the KDE contributors!
Phosh 0.55.0 replaces version 0.51.0 from v25.12. Stefan managed to reduce the number of settings apps we ship with Phosh by integrating relevant parts of the old postmarketOS tweaks app into Phosh Mobile Settings. Joel, Jane, Clayton, Achill, Vasiliy, Arnav, Rob, Juan-Rafael and Piotr worked together to finish the long-standing effort of switching from our custom display manager tinydm to what Phosh upstream recommends, greetd and phrog (!6106). Thanks to Guido and all the Phosh contributors!
Sxmo stays on the fine 1.18.1 release. Thanks to Willow, Anjan, Maarten, ArenM and all the Sxmo contributors!
Other Notable Changes
systemd 261 replaces 257 from v25.12. Thanks to Aelin, Clayton and the systemd developers!
Booting has been made more appealing by switching from pbsplash to Plymouth and updating the splash screen. Visually, you get three segments of the logo fading out and back in, and on the functional side it is now possible to press ESC (or power on phones) to get the boot log and we can finally rotate the splash screen on devices where it looks wrong otherwise. Implementing this was great teamwork by Clayton, Aster, Brady, Rob, Ferass, Hakşiye, Mirthe, bluebunny and Sicelo!
Another booting-related feature and part of a larger effort to make pmOS more accessible is that devices with working vibration can now vibrate on boot (!7563). Some devices still have missing modules in the initramfs for working vibration. For those devices and for those that cannot vibrate, this is a no-op. If you are interested in making postmarketOS more accessible, join the related chat (Matrix, IRC). Thanks to Ferass, Aster, Clayton, Casey!
The generic kernel packages linux-postmarketos-{mainline,stable,lts} are part of v26.06 and will be upgraded and kept up-to-date as long as v26.06 is supported. Thanks, Aelin!
Plasma Bigscreen is available again with this release (!8141)! This UI had been disabled in postmarketOS since v24.06 as it was not compatible with Plasma 6. Thanks, Bart and upstream contributors!
Plasma desktop is now using plasma-login-manager instead of sddm for the systemd variant (!8079). Using OpenRC with Plasma in postmarketOS is not recommended anymore. While it may still work, this use case is not maintained and will be disabled in the near future. "Someone can step up and take over maintenance of Plasma with OpenRC if they care though." Thanks, Bart!
v26.06 contains a ModemManager upgrade that brings new features like cell broadcast. Thanks to Guido, Achill and the ModemManager maintainers (Aleksander et al.).
New postmarketOS installations use sudo-rs instead of doas by default. Thanks Aster!
We did the usual wallpaper poll and are happy to announce that Alpen won this time — another beautiful wallpaper by dikasp that got an impressive 285/557 votes and comments like "i like 'alpen' because it is a reference to alpine :)". Find previous wallpapers on the wiki. Thanks dikasp!
Devices
The v26.06 release brings lots of kernel upgrades, improvements and bug fixes for many devices in the various device categories. Thanks to all device maintainers and contributors!
The following devices are in community:
- Fairphone 4
- Generic x86_64
- Google Asurada Chromebook new
- Google Cherry Chromebook new
- Google Chromebooks with x86_64 CPU
- Google Corsola Chromebook new
- Google Gru Chromebooks
- Google Kukui Chromebooks
- Google Nexus 10
- Google Oak Chromebooks
- Google Pixel 3A
- Google Pixel 3A XL
- Google Trogdor Chromebooks
- Google Veyron Chromebooks
- Generic Qualcomm MSM8953
- Lenovo ThinkSmart View
- Motorola Moto G5 Plus
- Xiaomi Mi A1
- Xiaomi Redmi 4 Prime
- Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus
- Xiaomi Redmi 7
- Xiaomi Redmi Note 4
- (and more in the testing category)
- Generic Qualcomm SM7150
- Xiaomi Mi 9T / Redmi K20
- Xiaomi POCO X3 NFC
- (and more in the testing category)
- Generic Qualcomm QCS6490
- Radxa Dragon Q6A new
- Lenovo ThinkPad X13s
- Nokia N900
- ODROID XU4
- OnePlus 6
- OnePlus 6T
- PINE64 PineNote new
- PINE64 PinePhone
- PINE64 PinePhone Pro
- PINE64 Pinebook Pro
- PINE64 ROCKPro64
- Purism Librem 5
- SHIFT6mq
- Samsung Chromebook 2 11.6"
- Samsung Galaxy Core Prime VE LTE
- Samsung Galaxy S III (GT-I9300 and SHW-M440S)
- Samsung Galaxy S9
- Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1 inch)
- Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0 inch)
- Xiaomi Poco F1
Testing Category
This release features 254 devices in the testing category (wiki, pmaports).
Five devices were moved from community in v25.12 to testing in v26.06 as their kernels were too old or became unmaintained:
- ASUS MeMO Pad 7 (ME176C(X))
- Microsoft Surface RT
- NVIDIA Tegra ARMv7
- Samsung Chromebook
- Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro
Device/UI 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 (#4169) and fixing bugs right before finalizing it! If you would like to join the fun next time, add yourself to the Testing Team.
The following issues are as of writing not yet resolved, help with fixing them is appreciated. See related issues for more information (workarounds etc.):
- #4522: pmOS_root is 99% full after reflash for some users (needs more information, if you are affected please comment in the issue)
- #4626: Phosh: prompt at startup for /dev/loop1p2
- #4274: Fairphone 5: artifacts when smoothly adjusting brightness
- #4618: Fairphone 3: audio volume seems too loud
- #4629: Librem 5: has no splash screen
- #4542: PinePhone: DTMF tones don't work anymore (so far nobody else was able to reproduce this, if you are affected then please comment in the issue)
How To Get It
New Installation
Look at install postmarketOS 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:
- Remove yourself from the input group unless you are running SXMO
- Uninstall ffmpegthumbnailer
- If you customized the kernel cmdline in your installation: read the new Kernel Command Line Configuration article and migrate your adjustments to
/etc/kernel-cmdline.d/. The old way will still work for some time with deprecation warnings.
Powered by
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! ❤️
We would also like to thank NLnet and NGI Zero Core for funding most of the infrastructure and maintenance work that went into this release. NLnet is funding a lot of great free software projects, including quite a few projects in the Linux Mobile world. If you would like to get your project funded, consider applying for a grant!
And what's next?
Many exciting developments in Duranium, Hardware CI and work towards slowly getting the first devices into the new main category, which will all result in making postmarketOS more reliable. Further details will be announced in upcoming blog posts. If you are interested in Duranium specifically, consider joining the public sync meetings.
Unmaintained devices will be moved from testing to archived. Consider becoming a maintainer of the devices you use with postmarketOS to ensure they stay around (see #4445)!
Members of the postmarketOS community and wider Linux Mobile scene can be found at various upcoming events:
- 2026-08-06 to 09: FOSSY 2026 (Vancouver, CA)
- 2026-08-15 to 17: FrOSCon 2026 (Sankt Augustin, DE)
- 2026-09-25 to 27: The postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference (Aachen, DE)
If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.
This blog post was written by Oliver. Header image by Oliver based on the Alpen wallpaper by dikasp and project logos.