Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses.
With Alpine Linux 3.23 it’s powered by the new Linux 6.18 LTS kernel as well as moving to the GCC 15 compiler and having LLVM 21 available. Plus a variety of other software updates like Rust 1.91, Valkey 9.0, OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4, Docker 29, OpenJDK Java 25, PHP 8.5, Perl 5.42, PostgreSQL 18, and many other key package updates. On the desktop side there is GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5.3, LXQt 2.3, and Sway 1.11.
Besides a wide variety of package updates, Alpine Linux 3.23 also rolls out version 3.0 of the APK packaging tools. The APK 3.0 release adds support for a new package and index format that is designed for better security, performance, and extensibility. The new index format supports newer hash algorithms, newer signature algorithms are also available, and for the package format is now support for Zstd compression. APK 3.0 also improves the APK configuration file handling and repository configuration format, adds several new commands, and provides a few other new features.
Downloads and more details on the Alpine Linux 3.23 release via AlpineLinux.org.
