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Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS
Quoting: postmarketOS // Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS —
Duranium is an immutable variant of postmarketOS, built around the idea that your device should just work, and keep working. You shouldn't need to know what a terminal is to keep your device running.
"Immutable" means the core operating system is read-only and can't be modified while it's running. System updates are applied as complete, verified images rather than individual packages. Either the new image works, or the system falls back to the previous one automatically. No partially-applied state. No debugging audio when you need to make a phone call and no fussing with a broken web browser when you just want to doomscroll cat photos. It also means developers can reproduce the exact state of a user's device, making it much easier to track down and fix issues.
Reliability and ease of use take priority over flexibility. Some choices that make it robust also mean it has higher hardware requirements and won't run on every device that can boot postmarketOS. Not every device that can boot postmarketOS will be supported.
The package base for Duranium is shared with current versions of postmarketOS, and improvements flow into both. Think of it as a different deployment model on top, not a fork.
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Linux phones could get even better with postmarketOS ‘Duranium’
Even though postmarketOS is an impressive effort to bring the open-source Linux experience to smartphones, it does have many shortcomings at the moment. Now, the project is hoping to fix some of them with a new immutable variant, called Duranium.
Duranium was announced today as a new immutable variant of postmarketOS, with most of the same benefits as other immutable Linux distributions. The blog post explained, “System updates are applied as complete, verified images rather than individual packages. Either the new image works, or the system falls back to the previous one automatically. No partially-applied state. No debugging audio when you need to make a phone call and no fussing with a broken web browser when you just want to doomscroll cat photos.”
The team is making it clear that Duranium is a “different deployment model,” and not a fork or an additional distribution. Not every device that can boot postmarketOS will supper Duranium, mostly due to the requirement for UEFI or U-Boot. It also uses more storage than regular postmarketOS, since there are two 5GB system partitions.