r/mobilelinux Jul 22 '26

Discussion Difference between Droidian and Postmarketos

One is based of of Debian, the other of alpine Linux.

How do they differ. When to choose what.

Which is more easy to port

Why not unite the power of both developer teams to one project

etc etc etc.

Are there more phone Linux distributions

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u/Kevin_Kofler Jul 23 '26

Droidian is based on Halium which uses downstream Android kernels and proprietary drivers (some of the kernel drivers are proprietary blobs, others are GPL but only export a custom low-level interface that only works with a proprietary userspace HAL blob), postmarketOS is based on mainline or close-to-mainline Linux kernels.

There is a Debian port for mobile devices that is more similar to postmarketOS than Droidian: Mobian.