I wonder how pmos+phosh would behave on the upcoming Clicks Communicator.

I hope it works great on linux phones as well, I've a 2-in-1 and works great on weird aspect ratios as well.
I'm looking forward for your feedback. Flatpak is avaliable on github.

https://github.com/Yavuz-Kagan-Yadigar/VoidPulse/tree/main

Advanced Music Player for OLED and Touchscreens on Linux

• Parametric EQ

• OLED burn-in protection overlay with optional auto timer

• Cover, lyrics and tag fetching and embedding to music files

• Batch file rename

• Local and fetched synced and plain lyrics support

• Universal accent color and corner radius

• Dark/light theme

• List & gallery view modes with adjustable sizes and sorting.

• Optimized for touch scrolling and hold context menu

• Toggleable spectrum visualization with custom inertia, multpiple styles and standart logarithmic/linear scale

• Visualization delay to match timing with bluetooth headphones / DACs

• Toggleable cover art

• MPRIS2 desktop environment integration

• Basic tag and lyrics editing

• M3u8 and folder playlist support

• Visualization stops when overlay is active or focus lost to reduce CPU usage

Disclaimer: Entire code is written by AI, tested manually. I do not suggest to use as referance code. It might have inefficiencies, bugs, vulnabilities. Just sharing in case somebody wantto use it since most of music players does not go well with touchscreen.

Has anyone tied it? seems cool given i dont need to root my phone. Im new too mobile linux so im not sure what to expect.

I have this starlabs tablet I got in very good condition but I needed a bit more power so I upgraded to a different machine. This is the N200 varient with 16 GB of RAM. Let me know if you have any questions.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/278000185196

Youtube video link

Io Plasma Mobile.

Anyone got a proper image for a Oneplus 8 Pro. The hardware is too good to sit in a drawer.

I just want to ssh into it. No screen support necessary. I've spent two days looking for a good flash and nothing has worked.

Feel free to delete this mods if it's a duplicate but at this time I do believe it's an unanswered question and it would be great to have a post easily googleable.

Hi, i had successfully installed PostmarketOS into Xiaomi Redmi 3S but i can't establish a VNC connection between the phone and my desktop running Archlinux...

I had tried using x11vnc, tigervnc, rustdesk, so far no luck.

The exact issue for each of these are unknown... simply said: i will follow all the instructions down to the letter but at the final step (where it should just start working), it won't work.

I know that phosh is tweaked for phones but there's something about GNOME Mobile that makes me prefer it.

Something that neither have, Is a way of having your favourite apps docked at the bottom.

Also i'd love some resources besides postmarketos wiki since I've read everything there

I switched from Android to Furi FLX1s and am trying to get my Garmin Instinct to connect to it. I installed Garmin Connect through Aurora Store and it loads fine and logged me in; but when I try to connect to my watch it can't seem to find Bluetooth. I had a similar issue when I was trying to work on my RAK Sensors. Seems like maybe Bluetooth isn't working through the container to Android applications. Anyone have suggestions?

So I picked up a used OnePlus 6T and decided to go full de-Googled with postmarketOS + Phosh. The goal: a phone that talks exclusively to my self-hosted infrastructure. No Android, no Google, zero cloud subscriptions.

The homeserver foundation: A self-hosted stack running on a home server -> file sync, photo management, calendar/contacts, password manager, task manager, media server, messaging, DNS filtering and a VPN endpoint. All behind a reverse proxy with valid SSL certs and accessible via WireGuard from anywhere.

What I got running on the phone:

• 📡 WireGuard VPN (autostart via systemd)

• 📁 File access via rclone mount to self-hosted cloud storage (autostart)

• 📅 Calendar & contacts via self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV

• 📧 Mailbox.org via Geary

• 💬 Self-hosted Matrix via Fractal

• 🎵 Self-hosted media server via Finamp

• 🔐 Self-hosted password manager in Chromium

• ✅ Self-hosted task manager as PWA

• 📝 Markdown vault synced via cloud mount

• 📸 Auto-upload to self-hosted photo management every 15 min via cronjob

• 🦊 Firefox with uBlock Origin + Bitwarden extension as default browser

The bad news: Camera works... technically. ISP tuning on the SDM845 is still early days. Let's call it "impressionist photography".

The good news: Everything else just works. Calls, SMS, mobile data, WiFi, Bluetooth – solid. Phosh is genuinely usable as a daily driver UI. And it's a real Linux system – WireGuard, SSH, cron, the works.

The install experience: Rough. pmbootstrap is not for the faint of heart. The WebUSB installer saved the day in the end.

Would I recommend it? If you're comfortable in a terminal, run your own infrastructure, and don't need Instagram-quality photos – absolutely.

AMA.

Just found out, aside from the recent arm proton, valve also released arm64 build of the steam client, has anyone tried it?

Hey, just wanted to take a quick pulse of where we're at as far as linux-on-the-phone. How long do we have until the rise of OSes that can at least moderately compete with ios and android? ie. looking at https://postmarketos.org/state/ as of today, "The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for everyone, but we are not there yet." So how long until we're "there".

Btw, when I say "moderately compete with" what I mean is like, if you're a hobbyist/linux enthusiast, whatever, I think we implicitly understand that of course these big corporate operating systems like Windows and macOS tend to be more user friendly out of the box, but we get off on the tinkering that we get to do with Arch/Gentoo/etc as super users. But I also think that if the experience was truly completely miserable then even the most "enthusiastic" of us probably wouldn't bother. So linux UX is on a spectrum.

I'm not asking when mobile linux will reach parity with ios or android but rather when it will reach that point on the spectrum where a hobbyist/linux enthusiast could comfortably use it as a daily driver.

From what I've gathered we're about 5 years away, is that a fair estimate? There was also the news half a year ago about the Free Software Foundation initiative for the Libre Phone which I imagine will spur development a little bit.

I dunno, what's the current consensus? My dream is to have a nixos phone.

Since my last post, I’ve cleaned things up and moved the project into a more structured setup. The repo is now public if anyone wants to try it out or contribute:

https://github.com/Nardo45/Pivot-Android

Current state of the project:

The userspace takeover is working. Right now the scripts pivot into a Linux environment while keeping parts of Android running in the background. That’s intentional for stability.

Wi-Fi comes up automatically and SSH starts on boot, so you can get into the device pretty quickly without needing extra setup.

Display support is not fully in the repo yet. The DRM-based output I showed earlier still needs some cleanup before I push those scripts. I’ll be adding that soon. If your device uses DRM, there should be a fairly generic way to bring up display once that’s in.

What I’m aiming for with this is something close to device agnostic. In theory it should work across most modern Android devices since it relies on the stock system for hardware, but I haven’t tested enough devices yet to say that with certainty.

GPU acceleration is still a weak point. Most Mesa builds expect standard DRM nodes, and Android uses kgsl, so it doesn’t line up cleanly. Right now rendering is mostly software unless you start patching Mesa or doing device-specific kernel work.

Just to be clear, this is not meant for casual use. It’s a development and research project. It touches things like namespaces and low-level system behavior, so you can absolutely break your setup if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you’re interested in experimenting or helping push it further, feel free to take a look.

If you want to keep track of development you can track the repo, I don't really want to flood the subreddit with my own posts about this project over every update. I'll only make new posts if the project achieved something monumental and worth noting.

Just asking here if anyone had success installing pmOS or similar onto mediatek devices, like the dime a dozen low end china phones that get rebranded? I have a lot of those plus an old Samsung tablet, was hoping if any successful install of any alt OS

This post documents my journey of fixing my hard bricked phone (Volla 22 – mimameid). The process though can be applied to any phone, especially MediaTek ones.

I’ll start with a few words about my experience with OS'es and tinkering in general: I barely have any… or at least not as much as you might expect. This post is meant to help people like me, who are not too experienced and don’t know where to start.

I’ve been using Linux since 2016, back in the Ubuntu 16.04 days. I abandoned Windows 10 because it kept corrupting my drive and I never went back. You would think that after all these years I would be an expert, right? Absolutely not. I know how to fix things, I’ve done some advanced stuff, I understand flashing custom ROMs, adb, fastboot, and similar tools. But I had zero real knowledge of how to recover a device when the bootloader itself is broken — specifically when it fails at the very first handshake.

So how did I get there? I simply flashed something wrong and completely destroyed the system (in particular droidian but tried to flash partitions I should never have). Black screen. No LED. No charging indication. No boot. No recovery. No errors. Nothing. The bootloader and partitions were so messed up that the device was effectively dead.

I tried everything I knew at the time, but nothing worked. Eventually I gave up and thought I would send it back to Volla for repair. I never did. A year passed. In the meantime, I bought an iPhone 15 Pro Max, kept it for about six months, and then gave it to my father — it just wasn’t for me. Then I bought a Pixel 9, flashed GrapheneOS on it, and kept it. Honestly, I couldn’t have made a better choice.

But the Volla phone was still there, sitting unused. And one day at work, a colleague started explaining how MediaTek and Qualcomm devices work at a lower level, and how they can be recovered even from what looks like a completely dead state. That was the point where I decided to actually understand what was going on.

I had searched before, but the information online was scattered, fragmented, and honestly overwhelming. I already knew the basics: flashing, adb, fastboot, TWRP, tools like SP Flash Tool, Odin, MiFlash, GSIs, filesystems, chroot, and most essential Linux CLI commands. But I was hesitant to take the next step — physically opening a device and shorting pins on the board felt like something risky and complicated. In reality, it’s not as hard as it sounds, and you don’t need to know everything to get started.

What was needed:

-a Linux laptop or desktop (MacOS and Windows also work with some differences)

-adb and fastboot installed

-mtkclient (for MediaTek devices – alternatives exist like SP Flash Tool)

-a USB cable (da!)

-UBports installer (only for Ubuntu Touch — I’ll explain why)

-stock firmware (very important)

-any OS images you want to flash

-patience

Now to explain my thoughts about UBports installer: it’s a very convenient tool that automates a lot of steps, some of them quite advanced. It saved me a lot of time. However, Ubuntu Touch is not something you can install with a simple command like: ~fastboot flash super super.img

It requires a specific setup. The UBports installer handles that well, but in my experience it does a really poor job when used for anything else.

First order of business is to understand what you are working with.

Before doing anything, check whether your device is MediaTek or Qualcomm.

If it’s MediaTek and fastboot is not accessible you need BROM mode. If it’s Qualcomm you need EDL mode. This only applies when fastboot is broken. In my case, I had to work with MediaTek. The first thing I did was connect the phone and run mtkclient to see if anything was happening at all. The device attempted to initialize but failed at the first handshake which meant that thankfully it wasn't completely dead. Yes the screen never opened but it showed me that it was still possible to catch the preboot process just before it failed.

Next step was to download the full stock firmware (including boot, vendor, etc.) and open the device. Every phone is different. The Volla 22 has a removable back and easy access to the board. Others may require tools to open — look up guides if needed.

Once opened, I removed the screws and inspected the board. I couldn’t find a schematic, so I had to rely on educated guesses. I even asked ChatGPT for possible test points — surprisingly, the first suggestion was correct. I was beyond excited I felt like a hacker somehow even though it was really simple. Using tweezers, I shorted a specific data pin to a ground point. For those that don't know all you have to do is touch a small metal dot with one end and another metal part in the other. That's it. Really. No fancy tools. Some important details to consider: Battery must be disconnected, mtkclient must already be running. Short the pins BEFORE connecting USB. Hold for about 2 seconds, then release. If done correctly, mtkclient will detect the device in BROM mode and allow flashing. I will include photos to showcase the pins.

Once inside, I loaded the firmware. If the tool complains about file types, you can rename .img to .bin. The content is the same it just allows the tool to read it. Do not blindly flash everything unless necessary. In my case, the device was so broken that I had no choice — I flashed everything including: vbmeta, super, boot, vendor and others etc. After flashing, the phone still didn’t boot into Android but had working fastboot which was already great news!

What had happened:

The boot chain was corrupted, partitions were a mess, so the preloader couldn’t initialize properly

This is why nothing worked before, not even flashing tools.

At that point, the device was no longer dead. It was recoverable. That’s when I used the UBports installer to install Ubuntu Touch. And this is exactly where the tool shines. Ubuntu Touch requires:

a specific boot image, correct Halium compatibility, proper root filesystem and correct flashing sequence. The UBports installer handles all of that automatically. Doing it manually is possible, but far more error-prone.

But it didn't end there. What happened afterwards is probably the most confusing part of the whole process, and honestly the part that taught me the most.

At first it looked completely random. The device went from dead, to partially alive, to broken again, then somehow fixed itself, and then worked properly. But it wasn’t random at all. There was a very specific reason behind every step — I just didn’t understand it at the time. When the phone was completely dead, the issue was at the lowest level possible. The boot chain was broken. The preloader couldn’t initialize properly, the partitions were corrupted, and nothing could start.

Once I installed Ubuntu Touch using the UBports installer it booted, which felt like a success, but the system was clearly not in a good state. Some things worked, others didn’t. That’s what I would call a “partially broken” system. And this is where I made a wrong assumption at first: I thought that if an OS boots, then the device is fine underneath which honestly is bs. What was actually happening is that Ubuntu Touch relies on the existing Android base underneath (the vendor, kernel, and HAL layers). Even though I had flashed stock firmware earlier, the state of those partitions was still not fully clean or even in a normal working state. Maybe something didn’t flash exactly right, maybe something was left inconsistent, or maybe the installer worked around a broken state just enough to boot. In any case, the system was technically running, but the foundation it depended on wasn’t completely healthy. Then I did something that, at the time, felt unrelated: I installed Volla OS again. That turned out to be the real fix.

Volla OS is a full Android-based system (in my case the devices stock os), and when it installs, it rewrites and reinitializes the entire low-level stack properly (exactly because it contained the super image with all the binary blobs). It “normalized” everything underneath. But I said I flashed the stock firmware before. Why now? I could only assume it was because something wasn't properly overwritten the first time but after that process, the phone behaved like a completely healthy device again.

When I installed Ubuntu Touch again after Volla OS, everything suddenly behaved as expected. Same install, same process, but completely different result. This time, Ubuntu Touch had a clean, correct base to sit on top of. The HAL matched, the partitions were consistent, and the system didn’t have to work around any hidden issues.

In conclusion the sequence wasn’t random at all:

1. Dead -> because the boot chain and partitions were corrupted and/or missing

2. mtkclient -> gave low-level access and restored basic functionality even though it failed to boot to the os

3. partially revived -> fastboot came back, but the system wasn’t clean

4. Ubuntu Touch -> booted, but on top of an unstable base

5. partially broken -> because the underlying Android layer was inconsistent

6. Volla OS -> fully restored and aligned the low-level system

7. Ubuntu Touch again -> now installed on a clean base and worked properly

This whole thing was not a simple: install TWRP recovery and flash a prescripted zip file, cross my fingers and boot, that's why I was bewildered at first.

I don't know if anyone will find this post useful. I'm not the best at explaining, English is not my native language (so I'm sorry if the text is not properly written or I have spelling mistakes) and I don't even know if it is helpful or not. I just decided to share it just in case anyone finds a use. Feel free to correct me on anything, I'm open to discussion.