Debian 10 'Buster' Released After 2 Years Development

Debian is one of the most important Linux distributions for the Linux community. Most popular Linux distros are based on Debian, including Ubuntu that most of us use.

Debian team has released the most awaited release — Debian 10 “Buster”. It came up after 25 months of development. Because of such a long time development, over 62% of packages have received updated versions and include over 13370 new packages in the repositories.

What is new in Debian 10 “Buster”

As always in this release also, the team has focused on making the Linux distro usable for everyone. So there are some important changes that users need to know about.

With this broad selection of packages and its traditional wide architecture support, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system.

from release note

Buster ships with multiple desktop environments. No matter which popular desktop environment you use, buster will not disappoint you. It includes the latest versions of desktop environments.

Debian 10 “Buster” Desktop Environments

• GNOME 3.30
• Cinnamon 3.8
• LXDE 0.99.2
• MATE 1.20
• KDE Plasma 5.14
• LXQt 0.14
• XFCE 4.12

Wayland Default Display Server For GNOME

Starting from Debian 10, Wayland is the default display server instead of Xorg for GNOME. Though, the option to use Xorg is still available so that you can use all those applications that do not support Wayland.

UEFI Secure Boot Support

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot prevents installing unsigned code. So most UEFI Secure Boot enabled devices face trouble installing several Linux distros, including Debian. But now, Debian 10 can be installed on most of the Secure boot enabled devices, making it much easier for desktop users to jump on.

AppArmor enabled by default

AppArmor is an access control framework that controls the capabilities of applications. The framework is now enabled by default on the buster release.

Optional hardening of APT

HTTP and HTTPS methods provided by APT (except for cdrom, gpgv, and rsh) can make use of seccomp-BPF sandboxing supplied by the Linux kernel. The sandboxing comes installed by default but needs to be enabled.

Driverless printing

Debian 10 “Buster” comes preinstalled with cups and cups-filters, which lets users seamlessly use printers without installing additional drivers.

Buster supports 10 system architectures

• 32-bit PC (i386) and 64-bit PC (amd64)
• 64-bit ARM (arm64)
• ARM EABI (armel)
• ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf)
• MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian))
• 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el)
• 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el)
• IBM System z (s390x)

And Many others

So these were some big highlights from the newly released Debian 10 “Buster”. You can read the release note for the complete list of changes in Debian 10.

The best way to know all the features is by trying it yourself—download Debian 10 live USB image. You can install it using the Calamares installer or standard Debian installer.

Download Debian 10 “Buster”