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Alpine Linux 3.16 has been released today as the newest stable series of this security-oriented and lightweight GNU/Linux distribution designed to be small, simple, and secure.
Coming six months after Alpine Linux 3.15 and powered by Linux kernel 5.15 LTS, Alpine Linux 3.16 is here to offer users much-improved setup scripts that now better support NVMe devices, allow you to add SSH (Secure Shell) keys and create an administrator user, as well as to introduce a new setup-desktop script to make it easier to install your favorite desktop environment.
Talking about desktop environments, Alpine Linux 3.16 now ships with support for the latest and greatest GNOME 42 and KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktops, the latter being accompanied by the KDE Gear 22.04 and Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04 software suites.
An important change in this release is the fact that sudo has been moved to the community repository, which means that users will only get security updates for the latest stable branch in the future. The Alpine Linux devs recommend the doas or doas-sudo-shim packages as drop-in replacements for sudo.
As expected, the new Alpine Linux release ships with some of the most recent GNU/Linux technologies. These include Go 1.18, LLVM 13, Node.js 18.2, OpenRC 0.44.10, Podman 4.0, Python 3.10, PHP 8.1, Ruby 3.1, Rust 1.60, R 4.2, and Xen 4.16. The devs note the fact that both PHP 7 and Python 2 branches have been removed from this release.
If you’re looking for a security-oriented distribution based on BusyBox and musl, you can download Alpine Linux 3.16 right now from the official website. Installation images are provided in Standard, Extended, Netboot, Raspberry Pi, Generic ARM, and Mini Root Filesystem flavors for 64-bit, 32-bit, AArch64, ARMv7, ARMhf, ppc64le, and s390x architectures.
Existing Alpine Linux users can upgrade to version 3.16 by running the apk upgrade --available command. When upgrading, it is important to be aware of the fact that both shadow-login and util-linux-login are now provided by the login-utils package in this release, and that the NetworkManager plugins were moved to subpackages and are no longer installed by default. More details are available in the release notes.
Last updated 2 years ago
