postmarketOS Is Now Called Nura

The mobile Linux distribution postmarketOS has a new name: Nura. The project announced the rename during the mystery talk at its own conference, closing a selection process that took about a year and a half.

Where the Name Comes From

Nura is an abbreviation of Nuraghe, the ancient granite towers found on the Italian island of Sardinia. Many of these structures were built before 3000 BC and still stand today. That longevity is the point: the project's goal has always been to keep the devices it runs on useful for as long as possible, and a name that has survived millennia fits that idea. The name was contributed by Davide Depau as part of the community call for suggestions.

Why Rename at All?

The team lists several practical reasons. The old name is long and hard to pronounce and remember in many languages, which made outreach difficult. The capitalization was awkward as well, with a lowercase p and m but an uppercase OS, and the project has been written as Postmarketos, PostMarketOS, post-market OS, and other variants over the years.

More fundamentally, the name is descriptive, and that became a limitation. postmarketOS was originally about giving phones a life after their market phase, but the project outgrew that scope long ago. PINE64 has sold PinePhones with postmarketOS preinstalled, which does not exactly match the idea of a post-market system. A descriptive name also cannot be trademarked. A trademark application for Nura has already been filed, which lets the project protect users against fraudulent use of the name.

How the Name Was Chosen

The community submitted more than 300 suggestions. A selection team went through them in multiple rounds and narrowed the list down to four candidates, which were checked for problematic meanings in as many languages as possible. The final choice was made with a range vote within the team, and Nura received the highest score.

What Stays, What Changes

The logo stays. It received small refinements, with more spacing between the arrows making it more legible at a distance, and it is now mathematically constructed so anyone can reproduce it.

The project's new home is nura.eco. The nura.org domain was taken and the owner was not willing to sell at a reasonable price, so the team went looking for alternatives and ended up with the .eco top-level domain. Domains under .eco are reserved for organizations committed to positive change for the planet and have policies against greenwashing, which the team says fits the project's sustainability mission.

For users, nothing changes in practice. The operating system works the same as before. Renaming all user-facing strings will take a while, so references to postmarketOS will remain in documentation, packages, and websites during the transition.