Summary
- Fedora Pocketblue Remix brings an atomic Fedora (OCI/OSTree/Bootc) to phones/tablets.
- Still a WIP: only confirmed on Xiaomi Pad 5, Xiaomi Pad 6, and OnePlus 6/6T for now.
- Check out the GitHub repo for installs, docs, and chat; hopefully, more devices arrive soon.
I’ve been getting into atomic Linux distros lately, which is a sentence I can only really say on a tech blog and not among my friends. But while I’ve only used an atomic distro on a PC, I am interested to see how it’d run on a mobile device. I’m not so brave as to wipe my current phone and go all-in on using Linux on it just yet (well, a non-Android Linux OS, anyway), but now that I’ve learned that there’s an atomic Fedora OS that works on mobile phones, I might just give it a go.
I turned my phone into a Linux desktop with this free app
It’s basically Linux running inside an app, with a desktop environment, too.
Fedora Pocketblue Remix lets you add Linux to your mobile device
It’s still a work in progress, though
We caught wind of this cool project over on the Linux subreddit, where someone posted a link to it. It’s called Fedora Pocketblue Remix, and as you might tell from the name, it’s built on top of the Universal Blue (uBlue) system. It’s an atomic Fedora system, but it’s a little different from, say, Silverblue:
Pocketblue is an atomic system that relies on OCI, OSTree and Bootc technologies. System images are based on upstream atomic Fedora images (Silverblue/Kinoite) and are built and distributed as OCI containers.
Unfortunately, given how it’s still a work-in-progress, it’s not confirmed to run on a ton of devices just yet. The only supported devices are the Xiaomi Pad 5, the Xiaomi Pad 6, and the OnePlus 6/6T. So if you have one of those just lying around, you can give this a try. Here’s hoping they add more options in future updates.
If you’re interested in giving it a go, you can head over to the project’s GitHub page and take a peek at Fedora Pocketblue Remix. The page contains all the files you need, installation instructions, and even links to chat channels where you can discuss the OS and document problems with specific devices. And if you have no idea what all the fuss is about, check out why an immutable distro is the perfect starting point for new Linux users (and how they solve a problem most home users don’t have).















