Now in December it was time for a new update of one of the most popular mobile Linux operating systems. Available from yesterday Sunday, it can now be downloaded postmarket OS 22.12. Its developers publish an article with some of the new features, but recognizing that it would be impossible for them to write something interesting if they added all the changes. It is also true that you can post a type link full changelog for those who want to know more, but each project has its philosophy.
The previous version, the third maintenance update of 22.06, it was released just to fix a nasty bug in WLAN. So it is not surprising that postmarketOS 22.12 has introduced important news. For example, a new version of phosh, the GNOME-based mobile desktop that will likely lose some prominence when the project launches your own system for phones and tablets.
Highlights of postmarketOS 22.12
- Added support for the Fairphone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1″.
- It is now based on Alpine 3.17.0.
- Calls for SDM845 in the Linux mainline kernel.
- sxmo 1.12.0. This version and the previous version Sxmo 1.11.0 introduced quite a few improvements for device profiles and explicit support for the OnePlus 6/6T, Pocophone F1, Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7 (2015) and Xiamo Redmi 2.
- Phosh 0.22 brings another style update and 10% steps for the battery info icon, as well as actions for on-screen notifications. They have also changed the default text editor from gedit to gnome-text-editor for new installations, and released phosh-mobile-settings.
- Plasma Mobile Gear 22.09 includes, among many other things, great improvements to the Shell, Homescreen and Dialer compared to 22.04. As for what gets installed by default, they have decided not to install Firefox by default on Plasma Mobile. Having Firefox and Plasma Mobile's own Angelfish takes up too much space on the install image. Of course, you can still install Firefox manually.
Existing users can upgrade with apk add postmarketos-release-upgrade, unless it comes from an update prior to the existence of this tool, in which case it would first have to be installed by opening a terminal and typing:
wget https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos-release-upgrade/-/raw/master/upgrade.sh chmod +x upgrade.sh
For new installations, images are available here.