postmarketOS Is Now Nura: Linux Phone Project Renames After an 18-Month Search
postmarketOS, the Alpine-based Linux distribution that puts a mainline-kernel operating system on phones and tablets that manufacturers stopped updating, has a new name: Nura.
The name was revealed during a “mystery talk” at the project’s conference on September 27, about 18 months after the team first said a rebrand was coming.
Why rename a project people already know
The team listed problems that anyone who has written the name will recognise:
- It is long and awkward to pronounce, especially outside English
- The capitalisation (lowercase p and m, uppercase OS) meant it was written a dozen different ways: Postmarketos, PostMarketOS, postmarketOs
- It was purely descriptive. “Post-market” made sense when every install replaced a vendor’s Android, but it stopped fitting once devices began shipping with the OS preinstalled
- A descriptive name cannot be trademarked, which left the project unable to protect its own identity
How Nura was chosen
A selection committee of Pablo Correa Gomez, Pan, Ranny Bergamotte, and Sriram Ramkrishna worked through more than 300 community suggestions. Candidates went through several rounds of checks for pronunciation and unfortunate meanings across languages, down to four finalists.
The final vote used range voting, where each voter scores every option from -2 to 2. Nura, proposed by community member Davide Depau, won with a mean score of 0.4. Range voting tends to pick the least-objectionable option rather than the most-loved one, which is arguably the right property for a name thousands of people will have to live with.
What the name means
Nura is short for Nuraghe, the stone towers built across Bronze Age Sardinia more than 3,000 years ago, thousands of which are still standing. The project frames that as a match for its core goal: keeping devices useful for years after their vendor abandons them, instead of letting them become e-waste.
What changes and what does not
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Name | postmarketOS | Nura |
| Website | postmarketos.org | nura.eco |
| Logo | Arrows mark | Same mark, slightly more spacing and a cleaner geometric construction |
| Trademark | Not possible | Application filed |
The .eco domain was picked partly because the obvious .org was not available at a sensible price, and partly because it fits the environmental argument.
User-facing strings across repositories, packages, and documentation will change gradually. The team is explicitly asking for merge requests to speed that up. Existing installs keep working: this is a rename, not a new distribution, and it is still built on Alpine and still ships close-to-mainline kernels.
Why it matters
Linux on phones has always been a longevity story more than a convenience one. Nura keeps the same approach with a name that fits the project it grew into. If you have an old supported phone in a drawer, it is still the best way to run a real, updatable Linux userland on it.