Linux distribution for smartphone

PINE64 PinePhone

We are sick of not receiving updates shortly after buying new phones. Sick of the walled gardens deeply integrated into Android and iOS. That’s why we are developing a sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS that is modeled after traditional Linux distributions. With privilege separation in mind. Let’s keep our devices useful and safe until they physically break! What is the current state of postmarketOS? Where can I download the latest release? Which devices run postmarketOS? How do I port my device?

What others say

Samsung Galaxy S II

— Drew DeVault, FLOSS pioneer and creator of Sourcehut and Sway

«[postmarketOS] is my personal favourite. It has a true stable channel where only select tested packages get updated to make sure it’s always a solid, reliable and stable experience.»

«With the widespread move to mobile devices, users lose control over their computing devices. PostmarketOS gives us the ability to run code that we can read and modify on these devices.»

Architecture

We avoid Android’s build system entirely. Instead of building a monolithic system image for each and every device, the whole OS is divided into small packages. These same package binaries can be installed on all devices that share the same CPU architecture. Device specific parts are kept as minimal as possible, ideally there is only one device package. In practice there is often the downstream Linux kernel too, but we are replacing those with Mainline wherever possible. In the spirit of most other Linux distributions, multiple user interfaces from independent projects are packaged for postmarketOS, such as Plasma Mobile, Phosh and Sxmo.

OnePlus 6

postmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux, which is so tiny (less than 10 MB in size) that development of pmOS can be done quickly on any Linux distribution. We install Alpine in multiple chroots to cross compile packages, build and flash postmarketOS, run it in a VM with QEMU or interactively port new hardware. All with our lightweight Python program pmbootstrap, without installing anything on the host system. Writing packages is easy, by the way: as long as you know how to write shell scripts, you are good to go. We have continuous integration in place that makes sure everything builds that gets submitted to our packages repository, among other sanity checks.

The above design decisions make it feasible to keep the system up-to-date, for all devices at once! Compared to Android, it makes development more efficient and democratic: you don’t need to afford a powerful and expensive PC to rebuild the entire OS. Just build the tiny part that you are interested in modifying.

Speaking of modifying, due to the free software nature of the project, you can change pretty much everything. We don’t even require running proprietary Android userspace drivers. In fact all proprietary components (even the WLAN, cellular modem and bluetooth firmware) can be excluded if building your own image with pmbootstrap.

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List of Linux distributions for smartphones, tablets and wearables

This list only includes independent, fully free and open source Linux distributions that are primarily designed to run on mobile devices. Distributions are listed in alphabetical order.

Name	Focus	Supported devices	Based on	Android apps	Interfaces
AsteroidOS	Wearables	13	OpenEmbedded	no	Asteroid
LuneOS	Smartphones, Tablets, SBCs	11	HP WebOS	no	webOS
Maemo Leste	Smartphones, SBCs	11	Maemo/Devuan	no	Hildon
Manjaro Phone	PinePhone	1	Arch	no	Phosh, Lomiri, Plasma Mobile
Mobian	PinePhone	1	Debian	no	Phosh
Nemo	All Sailfish devices	—	—	yes	Glacier
postmarketOS	Phones, tablets, wearables	210+	Alpine Linux	WIP	15+ different DEs
Ubuntu Touch (UBports)	Phones, tablets	14	Ubuntu LTS	possible (Anbox)	Lomiri

Other mobile Linux distributions

Those distributions are not included in the list above for several reasons, but still available for reference.

Name	Reason
Android/LineageOS/.	Clearly not «an Android alternative» for older devices
KaiOS	UI is not open source, only for a limited number of non-touch devices
PureOS	Exclusively for Purism devices
Sailfish OS	Not fully open source, not independent
SHR	Underdeveloped, probably discontinued
Tizen	Not independent, not fully open source, only for Samsung devices

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Linux on your smartphone: everything you need to know in 2021

One of the main issues with modern smartphones is the extremely short lifespan of this category of devices, which makes even high-end ones painfully slow within years. In fact, studies have shown that it takes the average European, American or Asian user less than two years to dump their old smartphone and buy a newer, more powerful (yet arguably very similar feature-wise) model.

This, however, is quickly changing thanks to projects like postmarketOS, bringing potentially lightweight Linux environments to new and old (also very old) mobile devices. While it is still early, in most cases, to have an usable Linux «daily driver» smartphone, this page should answer some of your questions regarding how Linux on smartphones work, whether your phone is likely to boot it properly and, if it does, how to choose a Linux distribution and whether it’s the case to switch now or to wait some months.

Do not forget that most of the procedures below might void warranty or cause temporary or permanent damage. Any content of this page is to be performed at your own risk.

Buying a Linux smartphone

Thankfully, getting your hands on a Linux smartphone in 2021 is much easier than it used to be. Many Librem 5s and PinePhones have already been shipped, and mature releases will probably be available for sale within this summer. We maintain a small list of native Linux smartphones that might be a good starting point if you are willing to buy one.

If, however, you are not ready to go for a full Linux smartphone yet, Can My Phone Run Linux? is a search engine for most known smartphones that can boot Linux. Make sure, however, to check the support level on the distro page in detail before getting one, as most features, like mainline kernel, modem and hardware acceleration are still not supported by most devices.

Hardware requirements

Sure, a lightweight Linux desktop environment might be much faster than most heavily manufacturer-customized Android spins, but there’s no black magic in «pure» Linux either. Which means that expecting to achieve more with your device than what the manufacturer initially designed it to is possible, but not very realistic. Especially if we consider that most smartphones are sadly not designed to be future-proof when it comes to their technical specifications, with tough competition for higher specifications every year leading to progressively heavier and slower OS releases.

Therefore, if your smartphone isn’t equipped with at least 1GB of RAM, 8GB of ROM (SD cards also count, but might be less reliable and slower especially on newer devices) and a 32-bit, 1GHz ARM CPU, the device will probably boot, but still be unsuitable for most kinds of smartphone features, such as desktop-like web browsing. In other words, anything older than 2012 will probably not render modern websites faster or more accurately than it did on its original OS. In case you are not willing to sacrifice Android applications, you should as well consider the relevant overhead of Android abstraction layers like Anbox.

In addition, you should make sure that your device’s mobile modem, GPU, power management and all kinds of hardware drivers you need are available on Linux. This step requires a minimum level of hardware and Linux knowledge, but for most users checking «what works» and «what doesn’t» from the wiki page of your device for the distribution you would like to install should already give a basic idea of the usability status.

If there is already a mature Android port for your smartphone, however, libhybris might allow Android drivers to run on Linux and get a GUI running quickly over it.

Software requirements

Another thing to remember is that running Linux on an iPhone or iOS device is almost impossible. Apart from the work-in-progress Project Sandcastle, there is currently no usable Linux distribution or porting for modern iDevices. Windows Phone devices that already received unofficial Android support, such as the Lumia 520, 525 and 720, might be able to run Linux with full hardware drivers in the future. In general, if you can find an open source Android kernel (e.g. via LineageOS) for your device, booting Linux on it will be much easier.

If your device is SIM-locked, you might want to unlock your device if possible before flashing Linux on it, as in some cases the necessary proprietary software handles for modem unlock codes might not be implemented in Linux.

You should also check if the bootloader for your device is unlocked, and if it isn’t, how the bootloader unlock procedure works, preferably from an official source (which means avoiding shady paid «unlocking services» unless you really have no other choice). If it is permanently locked by a carrier or manufacturer, or can’t be unlocked for whatever reason, you will not be able to run Linux or any other unsigned custom kernel on it, with the exception of limited chroot subsystems.

What are the Linux distributions for smartphones, and how should I choose one?

Several Linux distributions are specifically designed for smartphones, tablets and wearables, the most relevant of which are also listed on a dedicated page.

Your best bet at the moment would surely be Ubuntu Touch by Ubports, which is the only distribution to provide a fully-functional Linux desktop environment with a relatively large app ecosystem. To check if your device is one of the lucky ones to be actively (and officially) maintained, you can check the Ubuntu Touch Devices section.

Linux phones are not automatically secure

A common point in the Linux community is that escaping the walled garden of ecosystems like Android or iOS is already a means to higher security: no contact with Google or Apple servers ever again, nor cloud providers snooping on private files or contacts. The ability to freely sideload applications,

Purism Librem 5 receives major camera update, video recording capabilities

As we tend to mention often, cameras are one of the areas where Linux phones are often seen as lacking behind their Android alternatives. This is partly due to extreme fragmentation of sensor drivers, with most mainlined devices not having any kind of Linux camera support, and just partly due

Three new Linux tablets

In their December update, Pine64 announced the PineTab2, which is the successor to their PineTab from 2018. As a major change, the PineTab2 upgrades the slow A53-based A64 SoC with an A55-based Rockchip RK3566, the same chip that was used for the Quartz64, and that helped to mainline this chip

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Mobile Linux Distributions
Homepage and/or Download links	User interfaces	Devices supported	Description/Notes (as of March, 2021)		Update frequency
Arch Linux ARM	GitHub

Linux distribution for smartphone

Mobile Linux distributions