postmarketOS April 2026: A New Boot Splash and Ongoing Momentum

A visual welcome for every boot

The most immediate change users will notice this month is the replacement of the old pbsplash implementation with a fully‑featured Plymouth splash screen. The animation now fades the three segments of the postmarketOS logo in and out, giving the device a more polished first impression. Beyond aesthetics, the switch unlocks two practical features:

1. Press ESC (or the power button on phones) to reveal the boot log. This mirrors the behavior long familiar to desktop users and makes troubleshooting on handhelds far less opaque.
2. Automatic rotation of the splash on devices where the default orientation was incorrect. The change prevents a common source of confusion on tablets and convertible phones.

The work was a coordinated effort by Clayton, Aster, Brady, Rob, Ferass, Hakşiye, Mirthe, bluebunny, and Sicelo, tracked in issue !7482.

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Under the hood: ModemManager and other upgrades

While the splash screen grabs headlines, the edge repository received an upgrade to ModemManager 1.25.95_git20260422. Achill notes that a stable release is expected within weeks, and the new version brings cell broadcast support—an early feature that Phosh developer Guido has already integrated for testing. The upgrade exemplifies the project’s commitment to keeping the communication stack current without sacrificing stability.

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Organizational strides

Funding the future of q6voice(d)

The community has approved a modest €500 budget to support the upstreaming of q6voice(d) to mainline Linux. A previous blog post outlines the technical rationale; this allocation signals that the maintainers see a clear path to upstream acceptance.

Release process overhaul

The roadmap for the upcoming v26.06 release is now hosted on the official documentation site (docs.postmarketOS.org), replacing the older wiki page. The new structure separates release creation guidelines from issue templates, streamlining contributor onboarding.

Reimbursement policy expansion

A revised reimbursement policy (see issue !46) now permits community members to claim expenses directly related to development work. The policy’s activation is backed by the newly approved €500 line item (issue !23), encouraging broader participation from contributors who need hardware or travel funds.

Governance adjustments

Following the Hackathon’s discussion on power delegation, the authority to select finance‑team members has moved from the Core Contributors alone to the broader Assembly (Core + Trusted Contributors). This change aims to distribute decision‑making more evenly across the project’s leadership.

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Device maintenance updates

Two devices—device‑microsoft‑surface‑rt and device‑nvidia‑tegra‑armv7 (both using linux-postmarketOS-grate)—have been re‑classified from community to testing because they no longer meet the community criteria. Rob has stepped up to maintain the tegra‑armv7 port, ensuring continued progress despite the status shift.

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Duranium: The immutable variant gains traction

Clayton’s work on Duranium continues at a rapid pace. Highlights include:

• System extensions (sysext) are now optional on immutable images, allowing developers to layer tools without compromising the base system.
• Configuration extensions (confext) manage /etc contents, simplifying image customization.
• A major refactor of image construction (issue !15) improves reproducibility and reduces build complexity.
• CI now snapshots relevant packages from binary repositories, guaranteeing that all components are built from the same version set (issue !14).
• A bootloader bug affecting OP6/6T devices—where partitions with names longer than 24 characters prevented fastboot entry—has been identified and a temporary workaround is in place (issue !16).

Although Duranium will not be part of the v26.06 release, the community can already join the immutable chat and attend public sync meetings held every third Tuesday. These gatherings serve as an onboarding venue and a forum for design discussions.

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Front‑end polish

The project’s homepage now appends hash values to CSS filenames (issue !505). This simple change eliminates stale‑cache problems: when a stylesheet is updated, the URL changes, forcing browsers to fetch the latest version automatically.

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Contributor Support Programme (CSP) pause

The CSP, funded by surplus donation income, has been paused for Q2 2026. The pause allows the team to conduct a retrospective and redesign the funding model, with the goal of making future support more sustainable. Despite the pause, the programme is regarded as a success: it enabled significant development and organizational work throughout the first quarter of the year.

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Highlights from March and April

• Stefan focused on pmbootstrap maintenance, contributed to GTK debugging, flatpak packaging, and Phosh Mobile Settings, and helped draft the European Commission grant application.
• Clayton advanced Duranium, reviewed Plymouth integration, and contributed to systemd, QEMU, and podman.
• Pablo spent considerable time on grant applications, finance administration, trademark work, and hardware‑CI tooling.

These contributions illustrate the blend of technical and administrative effort required to keep postmarketOS moving forward.

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Looking ahead

Upcoming events include Embedded Recipes 2026 (Nice, FR), FrOSCon 2026 (Sankt Augustin, DE), and the first dedicated postmarketOS conference in Aachen (September 2026). The conference will feature talks, workshops, and a call for proposals—an opportunity for contributors to share their work with a broader audience.

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How you can help

• Maintain unmaintained devices. Check the status of devices slated for archiving after v26.06 and consider stepping in as a maintainer (see issue #4445).
• Join the testing team for v26.06 to gain early access to new builds and provide feedback.
• Support financially via the project’s OpenCollective page if you value the work being done.

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This monthly blog post was written by @ollieparanoid. Header image by @ollieparanoid.