The postmarketOS project released version 26.06, “Alpen Avocado,” on June 21, 2026, a six-month update for Linux phones, tablets, and laptops built on Alpine Linux 3.24. The release ships GNOME 50 on the desktop, swaps a custom boot splash for Plymouth, and expands the supported-device catalog to 254 handsets and other devices in the testing category. A ModemManager upgrade that adds cell broadcast support also lands in the release, a feature the foundation that funded the work calls “the common way to alert users about disasters and emergencies.”
The new release retires several pieces of custom code in favor of upstream-maintained components, a pattern that runs through Plymouth, greetd, and a new default for privilege escalation. The v26.06 release notes from the postmarketOS project open with a candid disclaimer that the software is “geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts.” The release was written by contributor Oliver and posted to the project’s blog on June 21.
postmarketOS 26.06 ‘Alpen Avocado’ Lands with 254 Devices in Testing
The release post is dated June 21, 2026, with the codename “Alpen Avocado” replacing the project’s previous “The One With…” Friends-inspired naming scheme. The new format pairs the winning community wallpaper name, “Alpen,” a reference to Alpine Linux, with a fruit, a change the project explained as more honest for time-based snapshots that often lack a single defining feature. The wallpaper “Alpen,” created by contributor dikasp, received 285 of 557 community votes in the project’s annual poll. Underneath, the release targets Alpine Linux 3.24 and brings forward a long list of component version bumps that touch every supported user interface.
GNOME 50 replaces GNOME 49 from v25.12 for desktop installations, while the mobile variant stays on GNOME 48 for this release, with fixes for a crash and a busy-looping issue credited to contributor Cédric. KDE Plasma Mobile moves from 6.5.6 to 6.6.5, and Phosh jumps from 0.51.0 to 0.55.0, a step that includes the long-planned switch from the project’s custom tinydm display manager to the greetd and phrog pair Phosh upstream recommends. Sxmo holds at version 1.18.1, and systemd advances from 257 to 261. The release also brings back Plasma Bigscreen, a TV-oriented interface that had been disabled in postmarketOS since v24.06 over incompatibilities with the Plasma 6 update.
New postmarketOS installations now default to sudo-rs, a Rust reimplementation of the sudo privilege-escalation utility, instead of doas. The project published a wiki-based upgrade guide for existing users, with a short list of recommended manual steps after the upgrade, including removing oneself from the input group and uninstalling ffmpegthumbnailer. The release notes thank NLnet and NGI Zero Core for funding most of the infrastructure and maintenance work that went into the cycle.
- 254 devices in the postmarketOS testing category
- 5 devices demoted from community to testing in v26.06
- 6 graphical environments supported across the release
- 285 of 557 community votes for the “Alpen” wallpaper
- 3 conferences the community will attend in August and September 2026
Cell Broadcast Lands in the ModemManager Upgrade
The v26.06 ModemManager upgrade adds support for cell broadcast, the 3GPP cellular standard governments use to push emergency alerts directly to all devices on a network in a geographic area. The work is funded by NLnet’s NGI Zero Entrust fund, per the foundation’s project page, which describes cell broadcast as “the common way to alert users about disasters and emergencies.” The project page, titled “Cell broadcast support for the Linux Mobile Stack,” makes the aim explicit: “to add cell broadcast support to ModemManager and the necessary UI elements to Phosh so cell broadcast messages sent to devices running this platform can be properly received and displayed.” The funding period runs from February 2024 through June 2025.
Cell broadcast is delivered at the modem layer, not through an operating system’s push notification stack, which has kept the feature out of reach of most Linux phone distributions until now. The implementation was led by Guido from Phosh, with Phosh contributor Achill and the broader ModemManager maintainers credited in the postmarketOS release notes. A separate update in the v26.04 development blog, written by contributor ollieparanoid, named the timeline directly: “Stable release will be soon (expected in a few weeks) and has been very stable for most users, while bringing new features like cell broadcast that we can start to test in Alpine edge.” As with any cellular feature, reception requires a compatible modem, and the per-device compatibility wiki remains the place to check which handsets qualify. The v26.06 release is the first postmarketOS cycle that ships the cell broadcast work in a stable release.
Plymouth, greetd, and the Project to Retire Custom Code
The most architecturally significant change in v26.06 is invisible until the device boots: a switch from postmarketOS’s custom pbsplash boot splash to Plymouth, the boot-time I/O multiplexer used by most major Linux distributions. Plymouth runs from the initramfs, before the root partition mounts, and handles the kernel modesetting handoff from the bootloader to the display. Replacing a custom one-off solution with Plymouth means postmarketOS inherits a well-maintained, widely-deployed component rather than maintaining its own boot graphics stack indefinitely.
The user-facing gains are concrete. Pressing Escape (or the power button on phones) now surfaces the raw boot log for debugging, the splash screen can finally rotate correctly on devices where the screen orientation was inverted during boot, and the splash animation shows three segments of the postmarketOS logo fading in and out. The Plymouth work, credited in the release notes to Clayton, Aster, Brady, Rob, Ferass, Hakşiye, Mirthe, bluebunny, and Sicelo, also touches accessibility: devices with working vibration motors can now vibrate on boot, the first step in what the project describes as a broader effort to make postmarketOS more usable. Devices without working vibration modules see no change.
The same logic, retire custom code in favor of upstream-maintained components, runs through the rest of the release. Phosh completed its long-planned migration from the postmarketOS-built tinydm display manager to greetd and phrog, what the Phosh upstream project recommends for new installs. Stefan, who worked on the Phosh settings integration, also pulled the relevant functionality from the postmarketOS tweaks application directly into Phosh Mobile Settings, reducing the number of separate settings apps on a default Phosh install. KDE Plasma desktop now uses plasma-login-manager instead of SDDM for the systemd variant, and using OpenRC with Plasma is no longer recommended, with full removal flagged for a future release. The sudo-rs default for new installs follows the same pattern, replacing a project-maintained utility with an upstream alternative.
A version-by-version comparison makes the scope of the cycle easier to read at a glance. The biggest single jumps are GNOME 50 on the desktop, Phosh 0.55.0, and the systemd move from 257 to 261.
| Component | v25.12 | v26.06 |
|---|---|---|
| GNOME (desktop) | 49 | 50 |
| KDE Plasma Mobile | 6.5.6 | 6.6.5 |
| Phosh | 0.51.0 | 0.55.0 |
| systemd | 257 | 261 |
| Sxmo | 1.18.1 | 1.18.1 |
| Boot splash | pbsplash | Plymouth |
| Phosh display manager | tinydm | greetd and phrog |
| Default privilege escalation (new installs) | doas | sudo-rs |
Which Phones Earn the Community Tier, and Which Fall Out of It
postmarketOS sorts its device catalog into tiers, and v26.06 raises the bar. The community tier requires an active maintainer, a near-mainline kernel, and documented working phone functionality, and the project moved five devices out of it this cycle because their kernels had grown too old or lost active maintainers. The full list of community devices, from Fairphone 4 and Google Pixel 3A through Nokia N900, PINE64 PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, Pinebook Pro, Purism Librem 5, Samsung Galaxy S9, Xiaomi Poco F1, Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, and the newly added PINE64 PineNote, sits at the top of the support pyramid. Below it, the 254-device testing tier covers everything else the project has ports for, including a long tail of Chromebooks, Qualcomm-based handsets, and a few laptops.
New additions to the community tier this cycle include the PINE64 PineNote e-ink tablet, the Radxa Dragon Q6A, the Google Asurada, Cherry, and Corsola Chromebooks, and the Lenovo ThinkSmart View, alongside the previously tier-leading Fairphone 4, Google Pixel 3A and 3A XL, OnePlus 6 and 6T, Samsung Galaxy S9, and Purism Librem 5. The release notes flag that the project has not yet promoted any device to the new “main” category, the highest support tier, and that work toward that milestone is ongoing.
The five demotions, each tied to a kernel that has aged out or an absent maintainer, are listed below. The release notes also warn that devices in the testing category with no active maintainers will eventually be moved to an archived state, a policy the project has been signaling since the v26.04 monthly update. For users holding one of the demoted devices, the upgrade to v26.06 still works, but the long-term path is to volunteer as a maintainer or to move on.
- ASUS MeMO Pad 7 (ME176C(X))
- Microsoft Surface RT
- NVIDIA Tegra ARMv7
- Samsung Chromebook
- Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 Pro
postmarketOS Still Names Its Own Limits in Plain Language
The release post opens with a candid disclaimer that frames the rest of the project. Camera support is absent or degraded on most supported devices, and banking apps that rely on Google Play Services device attestation do not work unless they run inside a Waydroid Android container with microG, a setup that has pushed some users toward alternatives like the Linux terminal features that arrived in One UI 8.5.
For users willing to accept those constraints, postmarketOS works well as a server, a kiosk device, or a privacy-focused secondary phone. The project’s own list of unresolved issues at release time, including a near-full pmOS_root partition after reflash for some users, brightness artifacts on the Fairphone 5, audio that is too loud on the Fairphone 3, no splash screen on the Librem 5, and a PinePhone DTMF tones issue awaiting user confirmation, underlines how far the project is from a one-size-fits-all daily driver. Each item is logged with a public tracker number, in the same format the project uses for every other bug.
This release is geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts. We are working hard towards stability improvements and automated testing, but if you expect Android or iOS levels of polish, then this is not for you yet.
Duranium, and the Work to Make postmarketOS More Reliable
The roadmap postmarketOS points to next is named Duranium, an initiative aimed at improving reliability through immutable system design and more predictable update behavior. A first milestone, system extensions on the immutable variant of postmarketOS, landed in the v26.04 development cycle, and the project has approved a configuration-extensions model for /etc management. The release notes also point to expanding Hardware CI, automated testing of postmarketOS builds on physical devices, and the long-running effort to promote the first device to the “main” support category, currently empty. None of these will land in the next six-month cycle, but the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference in Aachen in late September is positioned as a venue for the next set of updates.
Between now and that conference, community members can meet postmarketOS developers at three events. The schedule starts with FOSSY 2026 in Vancouver in early August, continues with FrOSCon 2026 in Sankt Augustin in mid-August, and closes with the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference in Aachen in late September. The release notes also note that the project’s Contributor Support Programme, which funded several staff roles in the first quarter of 2026, has been paused for the second quarter pending a retrospective. The pause is described in the project’s own monthly update as a necessary step while the team reworks how the programme is funded.
NLnet and NGI Zero Core are credited for funding most of the infrastructure and maintenance work in the v26.06 cycle, the same funding bodies that backed the cell broadcast work now landing in ModemManager. The postmarketOS release closes with a thank you to the broader Alpine, Phosh, Plasma Mobile, GNOME Mobile, Sxmo, and ModemManager communities, plus an invitation to contribute financially via OpenCollective.
- 2026-08-06 to 09: FOSSY 2026 (Vancouver, Canada)
- 2026-08-15 to 17: FrOSCon 2026 (Sankt Augustin, Germany)
- 2026-09-25 to 27: postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference (Aachen, Germany)
Frequently Asked Questions
What phones are supported by postmarketOS 26.06?
v26.06 covers 254 devices in the testing category, from the Fairphone 4, Google Pixel 3A, and Samsung Galaxy S9 to the Nokia N900, OnePlus 6, PinePhone, and a long tail of Chromebooks, Qualcomm-based handsets, and laptops. The community tier, which requires an active maintainer, a near-mainline kernel, and documented working phone functionality, is shorter, with new additions this cycle including the PINE64 PineNote, the Radxa Dragon Q6A, several Google Chromebooks, and the Lenovo ThinkSmart View. The per-device compatibility wiki lists each handset with its per-feature status and kernel state.
Can postmarketOS replace Android as a daily driver?
The project says no, not yet. The release notes open by stating the software is “geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts” and that users expecting “Android or iOS levels of polish” should wait. Camera support is absent or degraded on most devices, banking apps that require Google Play attestation do not work natively, and battery life depends on how completely the device’s power management has been upstreamed. postmarketOS works well as a privacy-focused secondary phone, a server, or a kiosk device. The Duranium initiative is the project’s path toward broader daily-driver viability.
What is cell broadcast and why does its addition matter?
Cell broadcast is the 3GPP cellular-network standard that governments use to push emergency alerts, including Amber Alerts, severe weather warnings, and public safety messages, directly to all devices in a geographic area without an internet connection or an app. The ModemManager upgrade in v26.06 adds the support, with the project funded by the foundation’s cell broadcast project page and the implementation led by Guido from Phosh. Reception requires a compatible modem; the device wiki lists which handsets qualify.
How do I upgrade from postmarketOS 25.12 to 26.06?
Existing users can follow the upgrade guide on the postmarketOS wiki. After upgrading, the project recommends removing oneself from the input group unless running SXMO, uninstalling ffmpegthumbnailer, and migrating any custom kernel command line adjustments to /etc/kernel-cmdline.d/. New users should consult the official installation documentation and the wiki page for their specific device.
