Alpine Linux 3.11 Introduces KDE/GNOME Desktop Support, Raspberry Pi 4 Compatibility

Alpine Linux is a distribution that prides itself on being "small, simple and secure" with being a lightweight distribution built off Musl libc and Busybox and popular for use within containers. But with today's Alpine Linux 3.11 release they are seemingly pursuing desktop Linux support.

With Alpine Linux 3.11 is support for running the KDE and GNOME desktops on the distribution. Beyond that, Alpine Linux 3.11 has support for Vulkan and even support for the DXVK translation layer that is used for Linux gaming.

There is also Rustlang support now available with Alpine Linux 3.11, Linux 5.4 LTS is the kernel version being used, GCC 9.2 is the default compiler, the latest Busybox and musl libc are present, and a wealth of other package updates.

Alpine Linux 3.11 also adds Raspberry Pi 4 support both for the AArch64 and ARMv7 32-bit builds.

More details on this surprisingly big update for Alpine Linux 3.11 via AlpineLinux.org. Looks like I'll be firing up some Alpine Linux desktop benchmarks shortly.