postmarketOS becomes Nura after 18-month community naming process

The mobile Linux distribution postmarketOS has a new name: Nura. According to the announcement on the project's blog, published on September 27, 2026 and currently on the front page of Hacker News, the change was revealed during a talk at the project's own conference whose contents had been kept secret until the moment of the announcement.

A name from ancient Sardinia

Nura is an abbreviation of nuraghe, the granite towers found on the Italian island of Sardinia, some dating to 3000 BC or earlier, many of which are still standing. The team writes that structures surviving for millennia are a fitting metaphor for the project's founding goal of keeping the devices it runs on useful for a long time. The name was submitted by community member Davide Depau in response to the project's original call for suggestions.

Why postmarketOS became a problem

The blog post lays out several motivations for the rename. The old name is long and, in many languages, hard both to pronounce and to remember, which the team says made outreach difficult for most of its members over the years. Its capitalisation, with a lower-case "p" and "m" paired with an upper-case "OS", also invites inconsistent spellings that confuse readers and writers alike.

The name is descriptive, too. While that once helped explain the project, the team argues it no longer reflects reality, pointing to PINE64 having sold PinePhones with the system pre-installed. And because descriptive names are difficult to protect as trademarks, the project lacked a legal tool against fraudulent or off-mission uses of its identity. A trademark application for Nura has already been filed.

How the name was chosen

The renaming effort began with an announcement in March 2025, so the process ran roughly a year and a half. The team says its first approach failed to produce the consensus it expected, prompting a new method; it also spent time waiting on trademark lawyers and decided it made sense to unveil the result at the conference.

The community submitted more than 300 candidate names. A selection team made up of Pablo, Pan, Ranny and Sriram Ramkrishna worked through the list in multiple rounds, weighing pros and cons, and narrowed the field to four finalists. Those were screened for problematic connotations in as many languages as the team could find speakers for, drawn from every continent, and all passed. A range vote among the team followed, with Nura coming out ahead at a mean score of 0.4 on a scale from -2 to +2.

New domain, lightly refreshed logo

The project now lives at nura.eco rather than nura.org. According to the post, the .org domain is taken but has no public site, and its owner declined a brokered offer to sell at a price the project considered reasonable. The team now says it prefers the .eco domain anyway, citing its strict policies against greenwashing and its fit with the project's mission.

The logo survives the rename. Contributor Ranny fixed small design inconsistencies, slightly increased the spacing between the arrows to improve legibility from a distance, and rebuilt the mark from precise geometry so that anyone can reproduce it.

The new name will not appear everywhere at once. User-facing strings throughout the project still read "postmarketOS" in many places, and the team is asking contributors to submit merge requests for missed spots, or to open issues pointing them out.

Why it matters

For a volunteer-driven open-source project, the name is often the only marketing it has. postmarketOS built recognition over years, and giving that up is a calculated bet that a short, pronounceable, trademarkable name will lower the barrier for audiences beyond the existing hacker community. The trademark filing adds a governance tool the descriptive name could never provide, and the .eco domain ties the brand explicitly to the project's central pitch: extending the useful life of hardware. For the wider Linux-on-mobile ecosystem, the change is a reminder that these projects are planning for longevity in identity as well as in device support.