The new release comes with improved security, better Unified Extensible Firmware Interface support and improved CUPS printing system.
The wait is over! The latest version of Debian Linux (code named Debian 10 Buster) has been released with numerous updated software packages.
The Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team took more than two years (25 months) to develop the new version, which they say will be supported for the next five years.
Debian 10 ‘Buster’ comes with improved security, better Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) support as well as new and improved CUPS printing system.
This newest release can run on most of the popular Linux desktops, including Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12.
By default, Debian uses the GNOME desktop. It relies on the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. However, the Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session.
In January this year, the Debian Desktop Team selected the theme “futurePrototype” by designer Alex Makas as default theme for Debian 10 ‘buster’.
New Features and Updates
- AppArmor, a mandatory access control framework for restricting programs’ capabilities, is installed and enabled by default in new Debian.
- The https method for APT is included in the apt package and does not need to be installed separately.
- Network filtering is based on the nftables framework by default in Debian 10 buster.
- The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support first introduced in Debian 7 continues to be greatly improved in Debian 10 ‘buster’. Secure Boot support is included in this release for amd64, i386 and arm64 architectures. With this, Debian should work out of the box on most Secure Boot-enabled machines, meaning users would no longer need to disable Secure Boot support in the firmware configuration.
- The cups and cups-filters packages are installed by default in Debian 10 buster, giving users everything that is needed to take advantage of driverless printing.
Debian 10 buster also comes with numerous updated software packages, such as: Apache 2.4.38, BIND DNS Server 9.11, Chromium 73.0, Emacs 26.1, Firefox 60.7 (in the firefox-esr package), GIMP 2.10.8, GNU Compiler Collection 7.4 and 8.3, GnuPG 2.2, Golang 1.11, etc.
Future Debian releases are expected to include tools and metadata to enable end-users to validate the provenance of packages within the archive.
