The mobile Linux project postmarketOS has a new name: Nura. It was revealed at the project’s own conference, the end of a selection process that started in March 2025, and the name comes from Sardinia, where Nuraghe are granite towers built three thousand years ago and older, many still standing. Nura abbreviates it, and the meaning fits: stability, for an OS whose entire job is keeping old phones useful.
Why the old name had to go
The project’s FAQ is candid about it. “postmarketOS” is long and hard to pronounce in many languages, and hard to remember in exactly those; the capitalization is grammatically awkward, with a lowercase “p” and “m” and an uppercase “OS,” and the team has watched it written Postmarketos, PostMarketOS and post-market OS. Being descriptive had stopped being an asset, too (PINE64 sold phones with it preinstalled long ago, so the name undersold the scope), and a descriptive name cannot be trademarked, which matters for protecting users from misaligned uses. A trademark for the new name is already filed. The goal, the team writes, is a name with less meaning and easier to write, pronounce and remember.
How Nura won
More than 300 names came in from the community. A selection team worked through them in multiple rounds, checked the four finalists for problematic connotations across languages, and range-voted; Nura scored 0.4 on a scale from -2 to 2, the highest. It was contributed by Davide Depau. The delay has three explanations in the FAQ: the initial process did not produce a consensus and was redone, trademark lawyers took their time, and the reveal was worth saving for the conference.
What actually changes
The home is nura.eco: nura.org is taken and its owner would not sell at a reasonable price, which led the team to the .eco domain with its anti-greenwashing policies, a fit they now say they prefer. The logo stays, refined: the arrows got more spacing so it reads better from a distance, and it is now mathematically constructed so anyone can reproduce it. Everything else is a sweep: user-facing strings still say postmarketOS in places, and the team is asking for merge requests, or issues if you spot a straggler and do not code.
The thing you install is the same: same OS, same maintainers. If you ran postmarketOS yesterday, you run Nura today, and the FAQ closes the chapter in its own words: “postmarketOS has served us very well, it brought us to where we are now, and will always be part of our history.”
My read
Renames are usually marketing; this one reads like maintenance. The old name was hard to say, hard to spell, and could not be trademarked; the new one carries a story worth telling and a domain whose policies match the mission. Strings will lag for months. For a project measured in keeping old phones alive, three thousand years is the right scale.
Source: the rename announcement and its FAQ.