Collaboration between postmarketOS and Necuno
So a few days ago the news has been released, postmarketOS is going to officially collaborate with Necuno Mobile. This means a few things:
- the postmarketOS project is receiving a device to develop postmarketOS on and for
- the device will be able to be bought with postmarketOS pre-installed
- there will finally be a phone-like device you can buy which has postmarketOS running on mainline with full hardware acceleration and all hardware working
As part of the collaboration, like I mentioned above, we will receive a device to port our system too. After some discussion it has been decided that I’ll be getting this device, which I’m definitely excited for! So far I have ported 2 devices to postmarketOS, the Jolla Phone and the Nexus 5X, the former of which had been started on by Martijn Braam. Although they run, they both have severe limitations like missing hardware acceleration and thus being really slow, or in case of the Jolla Phone not even having a working display. Now I’m getting this device, it means that once ported I finally have a device with working hardware acceleration, which should make testing Plasma Mobile and other software way easier. Right now I’m just limited to Qemu.
The most exciting part of this collaboration however is that the device can be bought with postmarketOS pre-installed, which is a first for our project. This does mean the name “post-market” doesn’t fit anymore though… Maybe we should rebrand the project? We will have to make clear that our OS is definitely still work-in-progress and people should not have the impression that they get a stable system they can use as their daily driver, but this is definitely going to help us towards that stable system!
I’ll be receiving the device either on or before FOSDEM, so hopefully I can show the device off to people interested. Just approach one of the few people walking around with postmarketOS t-shirts, there are not many of us (yet) 😉