postmarketOS in 2025-07: Fairphone 6, apk3, /usr merge, immutable, new plasma camera
Let's start with this amazing photo that Luca took of the Fairphone (Gen. 6) showing the brand new postmarketOS port. Like with Fairphone 4 and 5 before, he published it on release day of the new Fairphone, this time along with 59 (!) patches to upstream Linux! Below the phone you can see a new sticker pack that Ranny, dikasp, Oliver and Luca made for the upcoming FrOSCon 2025 event and many events after (!65, !66, until they run out, of course)!
We have two new Trusted Contributors: Rudraksha and Paul! Among other things, Rudraksha is working on mainlining MSM8960 while Paul is doing a port to the BlackBerry KEY2. Welcome to the team!
It is only July, but we have already made more than 100% of the whole year's planned income via donations! With that in mind, the team has unanimously approved an amendment to our budget for spending 6400€ to improve the reliability of the audio stack. As Pablo wrote in the "implementing missing bits to improve phone call routing" issue pipewire#3704: "So after talking with Arnaud, we are paying Richard A., a member from our community and maintainer of the close-to-mainline kernel for the Pixel 3a, among many other things, to try do this work and get it upstream.". There will be a separate blog post on this topic. Thanks to Richard A., Pablo, Arnaud and everybody who donated to postmarketOS to make this possible!
From GNOME's 2025-07-12 Foundation Update: "We are excited to announce that postmarketOS has joined the GNOME Advisory Board! This is particularly fun, because it breaks GNOME out of its safe shell. GNOME has had a complete desktop product for 15 years. Phones and tablets are the most common computers in the world today and the obvious next step for GNOME app developers. It’s a long hard road to win the mobile market, but we will. 🙂 (I’m just going to keep saying that because I know some people think it’s extraordinarily silly… but I do mean it.)"
