Nura (postmarketOS): The road to daily-drivable mainline phones

The Nura project has shown that running mainline Linux on phones is achievable for dedicated Linux enthusiasts. To make this technology accessible to a wider audience, the team has focused on three key areas: Duranium, Hardware CI, and reference devices. In this blog post, the focus is on reference devices and how they help make them suitable for everyday use with Nura.

The team has categorized devices into five groups: main, community, testing, downstream, and archived. The main category is now redefined to include devices with well-tested hardware CI and strong maintainership, ensuring they are reliable and maintainable for long-term use. Maintainers in other categories can also follow these new requirements to improve the reliability of their devices.

To be considered for the main category, devices must have a team of at least five maintainers, mostly from the Nura team. The team is responsible for fulfilling several key requirements, such as implementing hardware CI, maintaining reliable drivers, and ensuring the device can handle common use cases like calls, SMS, mobile data, Wi-Fi, audio, battery charging, Bluetooth, and camera. Once all requirements are met, a merge request is submitted to move the device to the main category.

Joining the device maintainer team is open to anyone, regardless of coding skills. Non-coding tasks like testing, organization, and triaging are equally valuable. The Nura team encourages interested individuals to join existing device maintainer teams or create new ones, and to reach out for support in funding development and hardware CI hardware. With the help of volunteers and donations, the Nura project aims to bring well-maintained, daily-drivable mainline phones to the masses.