postmarketOS is now Nura after nearly a decade of bringing Linux to phones

postmarketOS began in 2017 with the ambitious goal of keeping smartphones useful for 10 years. Built on Alpine Linux, its operating system aims to keep supported phones running long after their manufacturers stop providing updates. Nearly a decade later, the project is changing the name it started with. At its September 27 conference, the team announced that postmarketOS will now be called Nura.

The developers say the old name had become difficult to introduce to new people. It was hard to pronounce and remember in many languages. The capitalization is also grammatically awkward as lowercase “p” and “m” followed by uppercase “OS” led people to write it in different ways, including “PostMarketOS” and “PostmarketOS.” The name itself had become misleading too. postmarketOS sounded like software people would add to a phone they already owned, even though PINE64 sold new PinePhones with it preinstalled.

The team wanted a name that was easier to use and that it could trademark, something it says was impossible with the descriptive postmarketOS name. After a search lasting around a year and a half and drawing more than 300 suggestions, it chose Nura, proposed by community member Davide Depau, and filed a trademark application. Nura is shortened from nuraghe, the ancient granite structures in Sardinia that have stood for thousands of years. Their longevity reflects the project’s aim to make devices last longer.

The website has moved to nura.eco, a domain the team chose for its link to ecology. The familiar arrow logo remains, with slightly more space between the arrows to make it clearer at a distance. Users may still see postmarketOS in parts of the software while contributors update the remaining references.