Alpine Linux Shows Signs of RISC-V Architecture Support

Alpine Linux is a popular choice among users who prefer a lightweight Linux distro experience. Interesting bit: What started off as a fork of the LEAF Project now focuses on two key things: Security, and Reliability.

Over the years, Alpine Linux has been receiving regular updates with varying degrees of fixes and improvements. One such update is the recently introduced Alpine Linux 3.2.0 release, which has some important changes to offer.

Let's take a brief look at it.

🆕 Alpine Linux 3.2.0: What's New?

a cropped screenshot of the alpine linux website

Initial RISC-V Support
Desktop Environment Upgrades
Refined Packages

Initial RISC-V Support

For the first time with this release, we now have initial support for the RISC-V platform on Alpine Linux.

Details on this are scarce, but the developers have mentioned in the release blog that there is now support for 64-bit RISC-V implementations.

It's great to see another popular Linux distro adding support for this! 😀

Desktop Environment Upgrades

a screenshot of gnome 46 — A screenshot of GNOME 46 for reference

On the desktop environment side of things, Alpine Linux comes equipped with the recent GNOME 46 release. You can take advantage of things like better notifications, fractional scaling support, a reorganized settings app, updated core apps, and more.

a screenshot of kde plasma 6 — A screenshot of KDE Plasma 6 for reference

If you are not interested in that, then there's the inclusion of KDE Plasma 6, which brings about improvements like HDR support, an improved Discover app, a new wallpaper, Wayland by default, etc.