After over two years of anticipation, the Linux community has received Debian 9 “Stretch” as the new open source operating system. The new release is dedicated to Debian’s founder Ian Murdock.
Debian 9 “Stretch” is full of changes as compared to the previous versions. The Debian team took as many as 26 months to build the new distribution. Furthermore, the platform is designed to receive official support for the next five years.
“Debian 9 is dedicated to the project’s founder Ian Murdock, who passed away on 28 December 2015. Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of Stretch and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present the archive for more than ten years,” the Debian team writes in the mailing announcement.
While Debian 9 features GNOME 3.22 as a default desktop environment, you can deploy options such as Xfce, KDE Plasma or Mate. MySQL has been replaced by MariaDB in this version. Also, the release has Firefox and Thunderbird in their original flavours.
Replaced packages from past version
The new Debian version comes with a total of 51,687 packages. Notably, the development team has replaced over 57 percent of all the packages from its Jessie version. A large number of packages from the existing Debian builds have also been removed and will be marked as obsolete in package management tools.
In addition to the original version, the team Debian has released an Edu distribution of Debian 9. This new variant is specially designed for students and schools. The default monitoring tool in Debian 9 Edu is Nagios. Also, the team has included Plymouth by default, and the LTSP in the Debian 9 Edu comes with NBD for the root filesystem.
Debian 9 is available for download from the official Debian Project website. You can also try the new platform by developing a bootable Debian live system for your computer.
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