Alpine Linux 3.24 has been released with updated system packages, including Linux kernel 6.18 and Rust 1.96. The team also added IPv6 support to the system installer, and they introduced automatic serial console configuration for headless setups.
System76"s COSMIC desktop environment is now available in the community repo. System76 originally started building this DE because its developers found GNOME to be pretty limited. Plus, it did not help that with virtually every GNOME update, the changes broke System76"s custom desktop extensions.
As for system packages, the Alpine team moved GTK+ 3.0 from the main repository to the community repository due to its legacy status. py3-setuptools has been upgraded to version 82.0.0, while the old pkg_resources module has been completely dropped. The team also removed outdated packages that still relied on py3-six and GTK+ 2.0. In addition to that, libsoup 2 has been removed because the library was affected by multiple security vulnerabilities.
If you"re a GRUB user, the Alpine Team said that you must manually run the grub-install command with your specific device or EFI options right after upgrading your system, otherwise, your computer may fail to boot properly with the newly updated GRUB 2.14 bootloader.
New installations of Alpine Linux now offer an optional path to a /usr-merged directory layout if you set the BOOTSTRAP_USR_MERGED environment variable to 1 before you execute the setup-disk command. If you already run an older installation, you can migrate manually by installing the merge-usr package and executing its binary as the root user. The team recommends this layout to align Alpine with modern Linux standards, though you should verify your custom scripts before making the switch.
Alpine Linux is a pretty tiny (~5MB) Linux distro built around musl libc, BusyBox, and OpenRC. It"s been around since 2005, comes with its own package manager called Alpine Package Keeper (APK), and is widely used in modern cloud computing and software deployment.