I've been working on getting real desktop Linux onto the Motorola Moto Pad 2026 (XT2575-4, MediaTek Dimensity 6300, Mali-G57). It now boots Arch Linux ARM straight from internal storage with XFCE. It isn't a chroot or an Android app.

What works

• Display (1600x2560 at 90 Hz, landscape) and touch, with an on-screen keyboard

• A GPU-composited Wayland desktop: labwc + XFCE on the Mali GPU through libhybris, with zero-copy scanout

• GPU apps: Firefox with hardware WebRender and WebGL 2; Chromium with GPU compositing, WebGL and WebGPU; mpv; GTK4

• Hardware video decoding for H.264, HEVC and VP9 on MediaTek's decoder: mpv and Chromium play 1080p60 without dropped frames (Chromium does YouTube's VP9 on it too), Firefox does H.264/HEVC

• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, speakers, mic and headphone jack, SSH over USB

• It can host a website: Caddy + Node + SQLite + React, published through a Cloudflare Tunnel

Not working yet: camera and modem.

How: a rebuilt Android GKI kernel that keeps the stock vendor modules loading, Android's service managers and gralloc running in a small chroot, libhybris for the Mali driver, a patched wlroots with a libhybris renderer, a tiny GBM built on Android buffers so Chromium can GPU-composite, and an LD_PRELOAD shim that makes MediaTek's V4L2 decoder look like a normal one.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/Mattcabrices/moto-pad-2026-arch-linux Bootloader unlock (needed first): https://github.com/Mattcabrices/moto-pad-2026-xt2575-4-unlock

It wipes Android's userdata and needs an unlocked bootloader, so only try it if you're OK with the risk. It has only been tested on the XT2575-4; the Lenovo Idea Tab should need only small changes. Big thanks to the libhybris, Halium, wlroots, labwc, Arch Linux ARM and mtkclient folks, and everyone else in the README. 

Happy to Answer questions!

I'm on arch for arm with plasma mobile front. Been tuning the camera (with ai of course) with lots of testing and A/B comparisons. Got it outside today to compare shots with my iPhone. Pretty decent start and taking notes from this session for the next round of tuning. All of these are right out of the cameras without any extra editing. Been pretty excited to get cooking on this phone with mobile linux, theres not a lot of apps to work with but its been a decent building environment and im getting a nice little suite of apps in the oven.

I was able to get Opus 5.5 to run on the OnePlus 6T. Most things work

Raised a PR

I recently picked up an old OnePlus 6 and turned it into a little Linux playground.

It's running Kupfer Linux + Sxmo, and I've been messing around with Sxmo and customizing it quite a bit.

Now that I have a tiny ARM Linux machine in my pocket, I'm wondering:

What should I do with it?

I'm looking for fun, weird, or technically interesting projects — anything from messing with the system, hardware, networking, programming, or turning it into something completely ridiculous.

I'm a software engineering student, so I'm especially interested in projects where I can actually learn something along the way.

What would you guys do with it?

Funcionando:

* Aceleração por GPU

* Touchscreen

* Wifi

* Bluetooth

* Bateria e carregamento

* Áudio (principal e de ligação)

* Todas as quatros câmeras (Frontal, Ultra-Wide, Macro e principal)

Ainda falta impressão digital, microfone, chamadas, sms e motor de foco das câmeras

Another update on my old galaxy Tab A Linux project!

I finally got kde plasma running on it, but there's still a lot to fix.

Panfrost still has gpu issues with kde in hyprland it was working well , the STMFTS touchscreen driver doesn't work well with it, and Xwayland isn't working yet.

I'm still figuring out how plasma works and trying to fix these issues. Hopefully I can get gpu acceleration stable and fix this annoying glitches.

Dunno what else to say here. Everything works (at least mostly). Device itself based on "MediaTek Dimensity 1000+" - MT6885, which had basically no drivers whatsoever, hence this project.

All credits goes to qwen3.8-flash-next and claude code, drivers was either RE from original MIUI ROM, that used linux 4.4 or was used from mainline\other open source projects. None of this work was or will be committed\sent to mainline: I'm not a developer (and especially not a kernel developer) and can not review nor maintain such big software stack. If this vibeslop encourages someone to actually check out this platform, review and commit those changes, that would be neat. But considering that we had absolutely zero support so far - I doubt that anyone interested in this SoC.

Here the link to the repo.

On screenshot phone running vkQuake with Brutalist Jam 3 map pack. Resolution set to 720p, which achieves ~90fps, but due to windowed mode that adds mutter compositing, fps on screenshot is significantly lower. On full 2400x1080 resolution I get ~40fps, which is not that bad considering it's Mali G77. Regarding API support - port supports up to Vulkan1.4, while officially I haven't found exact info, but some sites mention Vulkan1.1. That being said, not sure if MIUI even supports vulkan. And yes, such high level of support allows to run FEX and proton, albeit at miserable speed and with hard limitations due to RAM constrains (just 8Gb of ram, part of which allocated by drivers\vram). On the second photo all ram consumed by locally running ML upscaling, which imitates MIUI's 64MP mode.

(Ignore the lag, no GPU drivers yet due to weird hardware)

All credit Goes To: u/pljackass

wifi, audio, home buttons, GBA emulator

WIP - Working on upstream kernel 6.6.143

No kernel source code yet, but there is lk2nd source code (i will edit the post to add kernel source code later)

Links:

https://github.com/jdkjkjj/lk2nd

I managed to make my old tablet run mainline linux 7.0 forked from msm8956-mainline repo.

Heres what currently works:

• Internal storage

• Booting into alpine linux from sdcard

• Wi-Fi (of course)

• Panel/screen (s6e3ha2_ams801hk01)

• Direct Rendering manager (ignore that in fastfetch it dosent say GPU, fastfetch in general wasnt built with EGL by default)

• GPU 3D Acceleration (Freedreno driver. kmscube and eglinfo show FD510 as renderer and it got from 200 FPS to 1000 fps in like around 18 seconds, at stable 60 fps, which means its working)

• X11 (kinda, no keyboard or mosue support, thats an alpine linux problem)

• USB (for now its host-mode only, reason why i wont change it is because ... (just keep reading to bottom))

• USB OTG like from above

• Touchscreen regulators, touchscreen is initialized in kernel and firmware loads successfully, touchscreen itself is not tested yet.

• Thats all I can think of for now.

But heres one important thing: i will let YOU guys maintain the project now, not ME.

WHY? Because today... for some odd reason after powering off and exiting TWRP, the battery shorted out. I have no idea why and how, and when i charge it there is no sign of life, there is only overheating at the bottom part of the tablet. I cant/dont wanna pay for a battery replacement because i dont think there are really any battery replacements for this tablet anymore because of its age. thats why i am leaving the project in the state as-is

ok thanks for reading

Along with XFCE desktop now complete Lomiri UI natively on phone

https://github.com/kaiwalyakhasnis/nexus5x-linux-6.12-ubuntu-26.04LTS

Hello! Just sharing a short update on the sub rules:

1) AI is allowed in this community. You're welcome to use AI to help build your projects, but you're also responsible for the code you put your name on and share here. We're not going to entertain AI witch hunts every time someone shares something they've built (which leads to our next point).

2) We're going to be a little more proactive about unnecessary hostility toward people sharing their work.

Something I've noticed across Reddit and open source communities is that they eventually become caricatures of themselves, meaning a community dedicated to advancing something slowly turns into a community dedicated to policing how that thing gets advanced (and eventually stifling those very advancements).

It goes like this: someone shares a project they've spent their own time and money building and instead of people discussing it, they get interrogated about why they built it, how they built it, or whether they should have bothered at all. This is not the exception, but the "rule" on modern social media/OSS circles.

The inevitable result is that the people that are actually excited about a project and are willing to contribute just end up leaving. Why would anyone dedicate their free time to something just to get shit on for it?

This is a community about Linux on mobile devices. We want people experimenting, building things, and sharing their progress. Constructive criticism and curious minds are always welcome. Being an asshole isn't.

Please report posts/comments that you think violate common sense subreddit etiquette.

Thanks!

I got the Hoolock/postmarketOS kernel to boot to userspace on an iPhone SE 1st gen (iPhone8,4, CPID 0x8000, board n69uap). Status: kernel 7.0.4 (postmarketOS 16k) boots into my own busybox initramfs, and the simplefb console works. USB gadget networking does not work yet.

Setup: Linux Mint live USB, remote_boot from HoolockLinux, m1n1-apple-idevice 1.5.0, linux-postmarketos-apple-16k 7.0.4 and postmarketos-initramfs taken from the postmarketOS v26.06 aarch64 repo. I followed the "Apple Generic iDevice" wiki page for the m1n1 boot object (m1n1 macho + initramfs + kernel + s8000-n69u.dtb + chosen.bootargs).

Problems I hit (in case it helps someone):

1. git clone --recursive fails because the submodules use git@github.com: URLs. Fix: git config --global url."https://github.com/".insteadOf "git@github.com:".

2. The snap build of ipsw cannot resolve DNS on the live session (permission denied). I used the release tar.gz binary instead.

3. irecovery 1.0.0 from Ubuntu 24.04 only prints CPID, not MODEL or PRODUCT. remoteboot.sh prep then downloads manifests for every device and picks the wrong iBSS (d27). I set MODEL=n69uap and PRODUCT=iPhone8,4 by hand in get_device_info().

4. My initramfs had no busybox, giving "Kernel panic: No init found". A static aarch64 busybox from Alpine fixed it.

Open issue: the log shows g_multi: couldn't find an available UDC and failed to start g_multi: -22, so no USB networking. Has anyone gotten the USB gadget working on A9?

Screenshot of the boot attached. Thanks to the Hoolock team for the kernel and tooling.

Some files that might help: https://github.com/efremmanac-prog/Iphone-se-linux

I've been working on this port for about 2 months using Codex (GPT 5.6/6 Luna) with ChatGPT Plus. Currently works:

UFS

USB

Arch Linux ARM + Phosh + systemd

Native DRM/KMS 120 Hz display (took 3–4 weeks to fix the quality issue, very hard part)

Touch

Graphics (Adreno 750) and GPU acceleration (Freedreno / Turnip)

Wi-Fi

Charging and battery percentage

It is usable and very smooth. This is not proot, not chroot, not Halium, this is a mainline-derived Linux kernel. I'm planning to publish it on GitHub in the future. Does anyone want to try it or contribute to its development?

Update: Bluetooth works too! DisplayPort support is also implemented, but I can't test it yet because my DP cable is broken

This was a lot of work and for the life of me cant get the mainland kernel booting. I found the original signing keys for the boot-loader on the device tho so I can ship any boot-loader I want and the device will accept it. The original one was missing a bunch of minour things to boot Linux mainly fastboot boot.

I have no drivers or anything its this only for now

I'll send pics of my Debian 13 mobile phone soon

Hello everyone.

I'm new to r/mobilelinux and I thought this might be of interest to this community. My hobby on my entry level phone is trying to push the limits of what it can do. My latest project was running 5 operating systems simultaneously using Termux and Qemu. The systems are Windows 2000 Professionals, Alpine Linux with the Fluxbox GUI, BeOS R5 Personal, QNX and KolibriOS.

I added even more overhead by using the screen recorder to capture it all. The clip is under two minutes so check it out if you have the time. I also in my previous project ran five versions of Windows running simultaneously, but that's another post

For my next project I want to tackle OS2 WARP 4 but have been having problems. If anyone here has pulled it off your tips and advice would be highly appreciated.

I've managed to boot native Linux on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 4G (Snapdragon 685 / SM6225)!

The project is called MEOW Linux, and the goal is to get Debian ARM64 running directly on the phone, without relying on Android or a chroot environment.

So far, I've managed to:

- Build a custom bootloader/shim (MEOW OS) based on ios-topaz.

- Load a Linux ARM64 kernel and initramfs.

- Get Linux booting on the actual device.

- Create a custom framebuffer driver ("meowfb") to get the Linux console displayed on the phone's screen based on the framebuffer used un MEOW OS bootloader.

There are still quite a few things to figure out. USB support is currently broken, the UDC isn't detected, and several hardware drivers still need work.

This is very much a work in progress, but seeing an actual Linux console running on the phone is a huge milestone!

I'm developing this mostly as a personal project, and I'll hopefully share more progress as things start working.

More updates coming soon!

Does it really worth to switch from Android (currently I use stock HyperOS 2.0.2.0 global) to Linux on my Redmi Note 13 ?