2026-05-07 –, Room 2 Language: English
Phones are all around us. They're not just there to call your friends and family with anymore, but dominate our lives and they are the main way most people on this planet access the world wide web. However, currently that "gateway to the internet" is controlled by 2 American big tech companies: Google and Apple. Especially nowadays it shouldn't need explaining how that's a bad thing.
Enter postmarketOS, a Linux distribution "doing it the right way". We're not controlled by a company, we do not force proprietary and internet connected services or even an online account at all upon the user and we actively try to work against the giant amount of e-waste that the current phone landscape is producing. We do this by using "regular" Linux with tools and UI's you already know and love from the desktop and porting phones away from their outdated kernels and proprietary drivers to the mainline Linux kernel and FOSS drivers like Mesa.
This talk will introduce the OS and show how far we've gotten in the almost 10 years it exists now, and the goals we're currently working towards.
Bart is a Flutter software developer in his daily life and a core team member of postmarketOS and package maintainer for Alpine Linux. He is interested in anything Linux desktop and phone related and is active in the KDE community. He maintains the KDE stack, including Plasma Desktop and Mobile, for both postmarketOS and Alpine Linux and likes talking about this with a lot of passion. He can often be found at events like FOSDEM and KDE's Akademy.