The Debian Project announces the release of Debian 10, codenamed buster, with five years of support.
Let’s learn more about Debian before discussing its new features and changes. Debian is a free-to-use operating system that comes with a variety of other software packages that are free as well. Many popular operating systems, including Kali Linux and Ubuntu, are based on Debian.
The highly anticipated Debian 10 release took two years in the making. Accordingly, it has a lot of new stuff to offer, which we will discuss later. Also, the makers have termed this release as ‘stable,’ so you can start downloading it on its supported architectures or using it in production environments.
Writing about supported architectures, buster, is available on ten different architectures, which include 32-bit (i386), 64-bit (x8664), and others.
New Features
With this release, the Debian OS has undergone several UI and performance-related changes. So, let’s have a look!
Desktop Environments
The new Debian will come with multiple desktop environments, such as Cinnamon 3.8, KDE Plasma 5.14, Xfce 4.12, and GNOME 3.30. The last Debian shipped with GNOME 3.22, so the users should check out the new GNOME with this update as it offers automatic codec installation for watching videos, tracker, and gnome-todo, with all packages based on libgtk3+ instead of libgtk2+.
New Default Display Server
The superiority of Wayland over Xorg is highlighted with this release as Debian 10 will have the former as its default display server now. With that being said, the operating system will still come with the Xorg display server, but the users would have to set it on default by themselves, that is if they want to.
Better Security
With the help of the Reproducible Builds project, the new Debian will have bit-for-bit identical binary packages for most of the source packages. What this will do is protect your system from malicious attacks aimed at compilers and build networks. The Debian Project is also planning to integrate tools and metadata into their OS so that users can make sure where their packages reside within the archive.
Another move made by the developers to enhance security is setting AppArmor as default for the new Debian. This software helps with protecting your system by limiting what your programs can access. Furthermore, all APT packages may now employ “seccomp-BPF” sandboxing, and the apt package now contains the https method for APT.
Updated Software
About 62% of the pre-installed packages that come with Debian have been updated with this release. Some of them include Apache 2.4.38, Chromium 73.0, Firefox 60.7, GIMP 2.10.8, LibreOffice 6.1, GnuPG 2.2, GNU Compiler Collection 7.4 and 8.3, Python 3.7.2, and Linux 4.19 series.
Other Key Features
- Buster comes with a new theme called ‘FuturePrototype.’
- The latest Debian is based on Linux Kernel 4.19.0-4
- Networking filtering works on the nftables framework by default
- Debian 10 comes with a highly enhanced UEFI support
- Secure boot is now supported on i386, arm64 and amd64 architectures
- Pre-installed cups and cups-filters packages for driverless printing
Conclusion
Buster is a significant release which not only comes with updated software and UI changes but is also more secure. If the new Debian has caught your interest, you can try it without even installing it through the available live images that you can get from here. If you want to have more insight on this release, make sure to check out the official release notes.
