v24.12: The One With Androids & Cameras, But It's Mainline Linux

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. Systemd is coming in the next one.

One thing that people have been asking us over and over is, will it be possible to use cameras with postmarketOS on Androids? While of course we all would like to see that, this is a significant challenge for postmarketOS and other Linux Mobile projects that prefer using the mainline Linux kernel and don't use the proprietary Android userspace blobs for interacting with cameras. But as you can guess from the headline, there has been a significant breakthrough: the Pixel 3A and Fairphone 5 both have front and a rear camera working now, and somebody even reported being able to record video on the FP5. One of the two rear cameras of the Pocophone F1 also works now. As you would expect, this is not on-par with Android's implementation yet and some of the media has a bit of a retro appeal at the moment. Nevertheless, this is a major achievement! Thanks to Robert, Richard, Luca, Joel, Alistair as well as the libcamera and Megapixels folks!

GNOME Shell on Mobile 46-mobile.1 replaces 45_git20240610 from v24.06. Besides the rebase on Gnome Shell 46, this has several visual, keyboard and inhibit/suspend related improvements. Thanks to Jonas and all the GNOME contributors!

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