“Alpine Linux creator Natanael Copa announced today the availability of Alpine Linux 3.11.0, a major update that brings numerous new features, improvements, updated components, and lots of bug and security fixes.
Shipping with the latest Linux 5.4 kernel series, the Alpine Linux 3.11.0 release is here to add support for Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer, which can be installed using either the AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) and ARMv7 images.
Alpine Linux 3.11.0 also adds initial support for the GNOME and KDE Plasma Desktop environments, which users can install from the main software repositories, support for the next-generation Vulkan graphics API, along with support for the DXVK Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9, 10, and 11.
Among other changes included in this release, we can mention support for the MinGW-w64 free and open-source software development environment (GCC for Windows 64-bit and 32-bit), and Rust support for all architectures except s390x (IBM System z).
Updated components
Alpine Linux 3.11.0 also comes with numerous updated components like Busybox 1.31.1, Crystal 0.31.1, Erlang 22.1, GCC 9.2.0, Git 2.24.1, Go 1.13.4, LLVM 9.0.0, musl libc 1.1.24, Nextcloud 17.0.2, Perl 5.30.1, PostgreSQL 12.1, Python 3.8.0, QEMU 4.2.0, Rust 1.39.0, Zabbix 4.4.3, and Xen 4.13.0.
Under the hood, this release removes linux-vanilla, as users are recommended to install linux-lts when upgrading from a previous release, and deprecates support for Python 2 packages, which will completely be removed in the next release. Additionally, packages now use /var/mail instead of /var/spool/mail, and clamav-libunrar is no longer a hard dependency of ClamAV.”