postmarketOS

postmarketOS is Alpine Linux on a phone — not an Android derivative with a Linux userland bolted on, but a real distribution with ordinary packages and ordinary tooling.

Why we still choose it

Because of the stated goal: a ten-year support horizon for devices that manufacturers abandon in two. For an organisation buying a hundred handsets, the difference between a two-year and a ten-year support window is the difference between a capital purchase and a subscription.

It is also the most honest of the three about what it is. You get a Linux system with a package manager, you can install what you like, and there is no open-core boundary to discover later. For a technical team, that familiarity is worth a great deal — the skills are the ones they already have.

Where it fits

Long-lived deployments, technical users, and anywhere the mainline kernel support for a specific device is good. Increasingly it is also the interesting option for purpose-built devices where the handset is an appliance rather than a phone.

The honest limit

Device support varies enormously and is the whole evaluation: a device with good mainline support is excellent, one without is a research project. Maturity is behind Sailfish, and calls and modem behaviour on some hardware still need checking rather than assuming.

We treat the evaluation as the deliverable. Often the most valuable thing we hand a client is the report saying which two of these three are wrong for their hardware, and why.