postmarketOS Renames Itself Nura After 18-Month Search

The Linux-based mobile operating system postmarketOS renamed itself Nura on Sept. 27, 2026, ending an 18-month naming process that reviewed more than 300 community submissions, according to the project's own rebrand announcement. The name change was announced as a mystery talk at the project's own conference that day.

Nura is short for Nuraghe, the name for stone tower structures built across Sardinia starting around 1500 BC, some of which are still standing. Community member Davide Depau proposed it, and the project's naming team said the structures' longevity fit a project whose goal is keeping old phone hardware useful for years longer than its original vendor intended.

Why a decade-old name had to go

postmarketOS launched as a way to run mainline Linux on phones that manufacturers had abandoned, and the name described exactly that: software for the post-market phase of a device's life. By 2026 that framing no longer fit, the project said, because PINE64 now ships PinePhones with the operating system preinstalled rather than users flashing it onto old hardware after the fact. The team also cited inconsistent capitalization across years of write-ups, variously PostmarketOS, postmarketOS or PostMarketOS, and said the descriptive nature of the old name meant it could not be trademarked at all. A trademark application for Nura has already been filed.

Bobby Borisov, editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, reported that a four-person selection team, Pablo Correa Gomez, Pan, Ranny Bergamotte and Sriram Ramkrishna, narrowed the more than 300 submissions to four finalists and scored them using range voting on a scale from negative two to positive two. Nura won with a mean score of 0.4. OMG! Linux separately reported that the finalist names were checked for awkward or offensive meanings across multiple languages before the vote, a step the team added after the original name's own five-syllable length had proven hard for non-English speakers to pronounce consistently.

What actually changed, and what didn't

The project's logo keeps its existing arrow design, with what the team described as minor spacing adjustments to improve legibility at a distance; there is no full visual overhaul. The website has moved from postmarketos.org to nura.eco, a domain the team chose in part for its ecological branding and abuse-prevention policies, according to the announcement. Old postmarketos.org links are expected to redirect. The code, the packages and the mainline-Linux approach that defines the project are unchanged; only the name, the domain and the trademark status moved.

Detail	Figure
Naming process length	18 months
Names submitted	300+
Finalists scored	4
Selection team size	4
Nura's mean score (range vote)	0.4
Announcement date	Sept. 27, 2026

The gap in the announcement

Neither the project's own post nor the Linuxiac or OMG! Linux coverage says what happens to existing user-facing references to postmarketOS inside the operating system itself, such as its wiki, its package repository names or its device compatibility list, on a fixed timeline. PINE64 has not said whether future PinePhone marketing or boxed packaging will carry the Nura name at launch or transition gradually. The rename affects branding and legal filings first; how quickly the substance of the project catches up to the new name is not yet documented.

Mainline Linux on phones remains a niche pursuit next to Android, and a rename does not change that. What it does is give a project with actual hardware partners something it could not get under its old name: a mark it can legally defend as its device count grows beyond PINE64 alone.

The project's shift from side-loaded hobbyist software to preinstalled hardware partner is also what shows up elsewhere on the open-source side of Android and Linux phones. Valve's Pyrowave codec, still in beta, is a similar case of a Linux-adjacent open-source project moving from enthusiast tool toward something a hardware partner ships by default. Madeira, which runs Windows PC games on non-jailbroken iPhones, is still squarely in the side-loaded, enthusiast-only phase Nura is trying to leave behind.