postmarketOS, the mobile Linux distribution based on Alpine Linux, is changing its name to Nura.

The rename was announced at a community conference on 27 September, after an 18-month selection process.

The team said the change was driven partly by the difficulty of using “postmarketOS”. The name is five syllables long and difficult to pronounce in many languages, while its capitalisation has also resulted in variants including “PostmarketOS”, “Postmarketos” and “post-market OS”.

As a purely descriptive name, the team argue that it could not be trademarked. The “post-market” framing is no longer felt to fully reflect the project’s status, not now it has its own hardware partners, like PINE64, who ship hardware with the OS pre-installed.

A trademark application for Nura has already been filed.

“Through the years, most members of the team have experienced difficulties doing outreach for ‘postmarketOS’ due to the complexity of the name”, the team say.

A new name was needed.

A four-person selection team sifted through more than 300 community suggestions, and reduced them to four finalists. Following a vote, Nura received the highest score.

What does the name Nura, which was proposed by community member Davide Depau, mean? It’s is an abbreviation of Nuraghe, which are granite structures dating from ~3000 BC and found across Sardinia.

A new domain is live at nura.eco, a TLD the team feels “fits perfectly” their mission and goals to help reduce e-waste. The old postmarketos.org website redirects to the new domain.

While the postmarketOS name has changed, the logo has not. It received minor updates, including more spacing between the arrows to improve legibility at a distance, but not a redesign.