Alpine Linux 3.24 scales new desktop heights with COSMIC
Alpine Linux 3.24 scales new desktop heights with COSMIC
Publish Date: 2026-06-24 05:35:00
Source Domain: www.theregister.com
OS PLATFORMS
Plus interesting news from the Xfce-on-Wayland project
Alpine Linux 3.24 is out, bringing a new desktop environment that should make for a very high-performance combination. Version 3.24.1 followed just four days later to fix some OpenSSL security issues.
The 3.24 series contains new versions of GRUB, LLVM, Rust, Go, Qt, and NGINX. Alpine isn’t an entirely GNU-free Linux distro, but it doesn’t use many components from the GNU Project: it’s systemd-free and doesn’t use the GNU standard C library, replacing it with musl libc. Even so, version 3.24 offers the latest GNOME 50 desktop, as well as version 6.6.5 of KDE Plasma. New for this release is “Epoch 1” of System76’s COSMIC desktop. The Reg FOSS desk took a look at the new environment at the end of last year and came away impressed.
COSMIC is the first pure-Wayland desktop environment we’ve tried that we would be willing to use full-time. We’ve tried it on some quite old machines, including a ThinkPad X220 with an Intel GPU and a ThinkPad T420 with an Nvidia GPU, and while we have seen occasional crashes on both, it’s so snappy and makes such effective use of a small LCD that we’re tolerating them and still using it. Given that Alpine Linux is also a useful OS for reviving sluggish old hardware, this has great potential as a happy combination.
Version 3.24 came almost exactly six months after Alpine 3.23, which used the newly appointed LTS kernel, Linux 6.18. No newer kernel has since been designated as an LTS release, so Alpine 3.24 defaults to the same kernel series as its predecessor – unless you opt into following the Edge version.
The Alpine Linux installation process remains quite complex and would be intimidating to newbies – although much the same can be said of Arch Linux, and that has not hindered its success, as reflected in the regular Steam surveys (although significant security issues might do). Alpine’s…
