Release Notes for Alpine 3.16.0

Important changes

/tmp mounted as tmpfs

Previously /tmp was just part of the root filesystem and was cleaned on boot via the bootmisc openrc service script. In v3.16, on new installation, /tmp will be mounted as tmpfs.

ICU data split

• icu-data-en (2.6 MiB) - Stripped down ICU data with only en_US/GB locale and no legacy charset converters (installed by default with icu-libs).
• icu-data-full (29 MiB) - Full ICU data.

TODO(jirutka): Describe this change.

New features and noteworthy new packages

Fixed not showing boot output using consoles with drivers compiled as modules

Fixed OpenRC output not being shown on VirtIO consoles.

SDL 1.2 migrated to SDL 1.2 compat

The old sdl package (SDL 1.2) was moved from community to testing and as such won't be part of Alpine 3.16. Applications that use sdl instead use sdl12-compat, which is based on the much more well-maintained sdl2 (SDL 2.0). This results in various improvements such as support for Wayland, PipeWire, and more gamepads.

utmp

TODO(jirutka): Write something…

https://skarnet.org/software/utmps/

The following packages are built with utmps:

• busybox
• dropbear
• mingetty
• openssh
• util-linux

login-utils

Allow users to choose between login utils from util-linux (util-linux-login) and shadow (shadow-login).

See ce0392393120a7077e99d50dec6f8574efe7f09a

TODO(jirutka): Polish it.

Zsh - modular zshrc and plugins support

TODO(jirutka): Write description.

Significant updates

• Ruby 3.1.2
• Python 3.10
• LLVM 13
• Rust 1.60.0
• Sway 1.7

KDE

Plasma has been upgraded from 5.23 to 5.24.

KDE applications (the release service) have been upgraded from 21.08 to 22.04 and KDE Frameworks have been upgraded from 5.88 to 5.93.

Plasma Mobile Gear have been upgraded from 21.12 to 22.04.

GNOME 42

Most GNOME packages have been upgraded to version 42.