The v26.06 of postmarketOS released in June 2026 landed some significant improvements, and I thought the time has finally arrived to daily drive my OnePlus 6T device with postmarketOS. This post describes my experiencing daily driving for the last month.
Overall, I was pleasantly impressed by how well things worked, and I am going to stick with this for the foreseeable future. Specifically, my daily driver phone is a OP6T currently running the immutable “Duranium” version of postmarketOS on the edge release and with the Phosh user interface.
I also need to emphasize at the outset that this is not daily driver ready for the vast majority of people. Mobile Linux has come a long way, but for those expecting anything like the experience of Android or iOS, this setup will not function as a satisfactory daily driver. Still, I think a description of one person’s experience of daily using a Linux-based phone can be interesting to see.
Phone things
Let’s start with what worked. Out-of-the-box, basic “phone” things including SMS for text, MMS for photos, mobile data, and audio calls over VoLTE have been working for me. This is really impressive and is thanks to some recent fixes to the kernel a tons of effort from numerous individuals working in the mobile Linux space. I am based in the USA, and I successfully made calls with both the T-Mobile and AT&T network.
While it was quite reliable, the modem has not been perfectly reliable. From time to time, SMS messages stopped arriving, or phone calls stopped connecting, and I had to toggle off and on the mobile network in settings, or reboot the phone, to get the modem working again.
These telecommunications features depend on the region and telecomm network being used, and so it is hard to know what the experience will be like with different regions or carrier networks. But having tested so far in places on both the east coast and the midwest, it seems quite robust in what I have experienced so far.
With a SIM card inserted, the phone is also able to identify my location with GPS and display my location on Gnome Maps just fine.
WiFi
The device does connect to WiFi, but on some networks, it only works if I connect to a 2.4 GHz band and not the 5 GHz band. I have so far not found a WiFi network I was completely unable to connect to, but I sometimes had to try different bands.
Apps and Web Apps
A quite decent number of applications on Flathub are adaptive for small screens and have an Arm build available – making them usable on mobile Linux devices. For example, I have been using Telegram, Flare for Signal, Cinny for Matrix, Karere for WhatsApp, and Dino for XMPP. I’ve been using Tuba to connect to Fediverse applications like Mastodon, and Newsflash as an RSS reader. Also, Signal Messenger very recently added an Arm build for Linux, and it works great on a small screen; this Arm build of Signal is currently available on Flathub Beta, and soon should be available on the normal Flathub as well.
For other uses, Web Applications have been incredibly enabling. Firefox is installed by default with a mobile configuration that works great. Having a modern web browser opens up an enormous amount of potential, as so much can be done on the internet as long as a modern web browser is available. I have some of the following applications bookmarked in Firefox and use them that way: Gmail, Protonmail, Reddit, Bluesky, 100Jumps, and many, many more websites are perfectly functional with mobile configured Firefox.
I sometimes install Web Applications to act as native applications. I first tried to do this with Gnome Web, and it is close to being a good experience. I like how Gnome Web has a great web application management interface and it is nicely adaptive for a mobile screen. But in the end, it had just a couple too many rough edges and performance drawbacks that I still prefer to manage web applications with Chromium. Progressive web applications are amazing in that they are just websites, but installed as a web app, they look and feel just like a native application on the phone.
Big limitations: Camera
At this point, most of the key features I need on a phone are available. The biggest missing feature is the camera. Technically the camera does partially work, but it does not auto focus and the colors are funky. So I basically treat it as not having a camera. When people ask me to scan a QR code, I just tell them that my camera is broken and I need another method to access the restaurant menu or whatever.
Why Duranium?
The immutable Duranium version of postmarketOS is super cool, and that is why I am using it. Updates are easy and reliable. A few weeks ago, there was a new image of postmarketOS released that had a bug which prevented the device from booting. On a traditional mutable system, this could have meant a big headache of effort to recover the system. On Duranium, after three failed attempts to boot, the system automatically falls back to the previous image that did successfully boot. This feature brings such peace of mind. Craftyguy was able to diagnose the issue and send a patch upstream, and newer images are successfully updating again. But it was nice to experience the promise of immutable systems in action.
This is in short why I am using Duranium: it feels stable and reliable.
Duranium is in active development, and a lot of features fundamental features are still to come. But I will say that I have found the stability and reliability to be useful for a daily driver. Of course, for anyone who wants to more deeply configure and modify things and use non-flatpak applications, the traditional mutable version of postmarketOS is always available as well.
Conclusion
Daily driving postmarketOS is not for most people. But I hope my experience has been interesting to learn about, and for those considering to pioneer in this exciting space, I hope this post is helpful.
For more ideas on what you can do with Mobile Linux, see this thread of comments on the Fediverse.