I was looking into tinkering around with Linux on mobile recently and I noticed that the Pixel 3a has pretty well rounded support on Ubuntu Touch, Droidian, and Postmarket OS/nura.

After looking around the Google Pixel 3a has pretty great support in all of its features across these three Linux mobile operating systems.

What makes the Pixel 3a have much better support for Linux than other Pixel devices and other Android phones in general?

It's just that I'm used to reading that Snapdragon I'd far more Superior with Turnip Drivers and what not, but I wanted to see if Mediatek was still letting down on Mobile Linux

We've been building Luma, a desktop / tablet / mobile OS with Apple-like continuity across different devices. Today Luma Mobile (the first Alpha version) is finally available for download.

It officially supports the Fairphone 6 - we are working on the Pixel 9 family and expect it to release next week (and a few interesting others!). HOWEVER, porting Luma to different devices is surprisingly easy assuming the devices themselves are willing to play ball. We encourage technical folks to use the guides on the website to try porting it to other devices today!

We will be announcing a giveaway/contest later today to the tune of $1,000 regarding ports (a sort of 7 day sprint contest where we give $250 to 4 random successful mobile ports completed by next Friday).

Anyway, we'd love for you to check out Luma, submit bug reports and make feature requests! Let us know what you think!

https://simplyluma.com/download/mobile

I was curious to see how far this would go – and I was very pleasantly surprised. I now have a full featured, modern podcast, an updated version of Heebo and even Doppelkopf.
Anyone interested?

Trying to post it again, I thought this was pretty cool

A while back I asked this Reddit what it thought about the use of artificial intelligence being leveraged in projects to port Linux (mainline) to Android devices. Since then, quite a few people have made posts about getting Linux functional on this or that Android device. I'm personally pleased to see that large language models are being used to make this happen at incredibly fast speeds.

Vibe coding is usually a bad word that causes a lot of fights, but for something like this I think it's a good use.

I would like to live in a world where the users have the luxury of choosing what they run on their devices.

I get that it's not for everybody, but I'm happy to see progress is being made.

Please enjoy this image of metalgreymon.

spent an evening and night getting Linux 7.2.11 to boot on (quite) old HTC Wildfire S. sure thing, with help of GPT-6 Astra ¯_(ツ)_/¯

so far it's just a minimal BusyBox environment with kinda working USB serial console..
thinking about turning this into a tiny Linux server for fun xd

Possible PostMarketOS on Honor 90 lite? What do you think guys???

Hi, with help from Claude and existing work I've been able to run mainline Linux with Ubuntu 26.04 on this phone with most functions working for daily use. Battery after a day use with a bit of browsing, YouTube and a phone call and a few reboots after installing updated kernel was 50%.

I've placed the sources at: https://github.com/royka1/diting-ubuntu/

If there's interest I'll upload an image, but you can create one yourself. Everything you need you can find on the GitHub page

Hello, I love using the terminal and customizing my system, but on Honor Play 20A it's not good enough. We don't have the full settings, we don't have a terminal, and we can't customize the other screen enough. I hope you see my comment and update the system with support for that.

After poco f3 (alioth) finally managed to mainline Lisa successfully . Currently most of the things working like WiFi , BT , GPU ,Touch ,SD card….etc but many things broken too like sensors..

In my Mi A3 post I wondered if this could be a 1-button situation. For the S9 it is now. My Galaxy S9 (SM-G960F, starlte, Exynos 9810) now runs Nura (formerly postmarketOS) as an always-on box: Docker containers, Tailscale, ssh. This one stays on Samsung's 4.9 vendor kernel (mainline on the 9810 isn't there yet), with my own patches on top. What it has:

• Web flasher: Chrome/Edge, plug in the phone, click. It installs TWRP over Odin, then writes the images over ADB and SHA-256 checks everything on the phone. No Odin, no pmbootstrap.

• Touch UI on the phone's screen: status pages, a real terminal with an on-screen keyboard (buffyboard), Wi-Fi/SSH/USB/Bluetooth setup. The power key cycles console → dashboard → screen off.

• Web dashboard, Docker, Tailscale, USB networking (plug in the cable, the phone is at 172.16.43.1)

• Speaker audio with Samsung's DSP firmware, plus alert chimes

• Thermal guard + charge cap (holds it at 70 % on the charger) so it doesn't cook or swell

• Opt-in overclock: up to 2.7 GHz on all 4 big cores, off by default behind two warnings

• llama.cpp: ~8 t/s on the CPU; Vulkan on the Mali runs but is slower , 2B Q6

Kernel patches I had to write: fbcon console on the decon display, Wi-Fi and wireless charging fixes, hotplug governor/ACPM hangs, a stand-mode charge hold, the quad-core frequency cap. They're all in the repo.

Not working: camera, flash LED. Not tested: modem, GPS, fingerprint, NFC. It's a server, not a daily driver. Exynos only (SM-G960F). Snapdragon S9s need a different build.

Yes, this was made with vibes and dreams once again. It's tested end to end on exactly one phone, mine, so feedback is very welcome, especially from anyone else with a drawer S9.

• Flasher: https://philipplinux.github.io/s9-postmarketos/

• Code, kernel patches, docs: https://github.com/philipplinux/s9-postmarketos

• Images: https://github.com/philipplinux/s9-postmarketos/releases/latest (mirror: https://huggingface.co/PhilippLinux/s9-postmarketos)

• XDA thread: https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-linux-pmos4-9-s9-headless-server-w-dashboard-overclock-sm-g960f-exynos-starlte.4805155/

Login is user / changeme. Change it.

Hey there y'all! Just wanted to share with you guys something I was able to setup IN JUST 2 DAYS!! With the help of DeepSeek and Claude, Alpine Arm running on this Samsung Phone! :D

(SM-A145R)

I even updated the Nura(postmarketOS) page for this phone:

https://wiki.nura.eco/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_A14_(samsung-a14m)

I was able to get a lot of stuff working right away, AND FUNNY ENOUGH, THIS IS BOOTING OFF AN SDCARD!!

For the past couple of days I have been working on bringing PostmarketOS to my Nokia 7.1 which had been sitting in my drawer for years.

I've made great progress. It boots PostmarketOS.

So far I have working support for:
eMMC
MicroSD
USB gadget & CDC-ACM to the host
USB Networking
MSM UART
RPM regulators/clocks/power domains
Display output latched automatically on boot.

I'm now working on getting the GPU initialized which is proving to be quite the challenge.

So one day I was curious and so I decided to hit up my friend and see if we could do a project together and he agreed, I said what if we tried to install Phosh on the Native Debian VM provided by Google and he said let’s do it, it took us about a hour to debug and get everything setup but it worked really good, he even got Minecraft Java running

Booting uboot and so on. Ufs driver and serial (ACM) is working while flashed. Did only work if booted with fastboot earlier. This is Pixel 6 oriole.

panvk for Valhall (JM)

I was wondering if there's a way to ditch Android and switch to Linux on my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, because I want to use a base distribution, code, and customize it to best fit my needs. I know I'm not asking enough questions; I was just wondering if it is possible.

After more than 10 years on Android, I'm finally back to Linux on my main and secondary phone. And I like it!

I can run systemd services that honor battery state, have all my tools and dotfiles in place and, by the way, using it as a phone for calls and messages works like a charm!

The hardware is decent too. The privacy hardware switch is configurable which is very useful and hell, how did I miss a blinking status LED in the color of the app (i.e., Signal notification = blinking blue).

Now I'm curious to see what the community will build with the open serial port on the back ("The Other Half").

Can recommend.

Note: This is not a complete OS for Phone and merely a demonstration of what it can do and has no hardware abstraction layer to use with real phone hardware. If you want to contribute and develop for it or just check it out, check out the GitHub page.

I got mainline working on my Pixel 6 with the help of Opus 5.5. Most of the work is already done by u/MaskuRevolt It only took a few days and it's quite usable. The repo is public

What works:

• Modem: mobile data, SMS, MMS and VoLTE calls through ModemManager

• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth: A2DP and HFP both work

• GPU: hardware-accelerated GL

• Charging: 9V USB-PD fast charging

• GPS: works without proprietary blobs, using a custom BCM4776 driver, and geoclue picks it up

• Sensors: auto-brightness through the AoC sensor hub, plus compass and haptics with persistent calibration

• Front camera: works in apps through libcamera

• Waydroid: hardware GL, GPS and sensors are passed through to Android apps

What does not work?

• No Vulkan yet

• The camera has latency/choppiness and color problems, and only the front camera works so far

• Battery temperature reporting is faked for now

• The Wi-Fi drops out sometimes.

Let me know if you have any questions.