Draft Release Notes for Alpine 3.21.0

Highlights

• GCC 14.2.0
• Go 1.23.3
• Rust 1.82
• GNOME 47.1
• KDE Plasma 6.2.3
• LXQt 2.1.0

Important changes

OpenSSH

Note: TODO: Remove this section if https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/68589 gets merged before 3.21 is released

You need to restart your sshd service!

Since the 9.8_p1 release, openssh-server is now split into two binaries, sshd and sshd-session. With this change sshd needs to be restarted to be able to accept new connections.

Since managing services has always been out-of-scope for apk, we will NOT do the following for you:

rc-service --ifstarted sshd restart

New loongarch64 architecture

Alpine 3.21 is the first release which is available for loongarch64.

Thanks to the support of the team of Loongson dedicated to supporting Alpine Linux and many other contributors.

Significant changes

LXQt 2.0.0

LXQt has been updated to release 2.0.

• It now uses Qt6
• Many parts of LXQt are now wayland ready¹, but wayland ports of the following are pending: screengrab, lxqt-globalkeys, LXQt Panel's task-bar² and keyboard indicator, some input settings, and settings of monitor, power button, and screen locker.
• LXQt Panel has a new default application menu called Fancy Menu.

¹ lxqt-wayland-session has not been released or packaged yet, but most folks wanting to test on wayland will want to use it.
² Most folks testing LXQt on wayland are using waybar temporarily until the task-bar is ported.

Jellyfin

Jellyfin now uses the recommended fork of ffmpeg called jellyfin-ffmpeg by default. If you want to change that, take a look at the ffmpegpath variable in /etc/conf.d/jellyfin. (!69924)

Jellyfin was disabled for ARM architectures (aarch64 and armv7) and is only available for x86_64. The relevant issue is: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/16613

Bats

"main/bats" was renamed to "main/bats-core". Now there is a meta package "community/bats" which contains:

• bats-core
• bats-file
• bats-support
• bats-assert

Significant removals

ISC DHCP

Note: TODO: Write something cool if https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/70974 (or alternative) is merged

Gogs

gogs was removed due to multiple high-severity vulnerabilities which are open within a year. The developers of Gogs were contacted multiple times by the Forgejo team, but got no response. Therefore we removed Gogs from our repositories. (!75304)

Please consider migrating to forgejo or gitea. Both forks are available in our community repo, like gogs was.

The Gitea fork of Gogs was created in 2016 by contributors who were annoyed by the single-maintainer management model of Gogs. Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which was created because the for-profit company Gitea Ltd took over the maintainership, see also https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/.