Debian It is, possibly, the most relevant Linux distribution among all how many there are: it may not be the most popular in number of users, but it is is the ‘mother’ (or ‘grandmother’) distribution of a huge number of other distributions, starting with Ubuntu and its entire ecosystem (Kubuntu, Xubuntu …) and its derivatives (such as KDE Neon, Linux Mint or Elementary OS), and others such as Raspberry Pi OS, MX Linux, Trisquel, Kali Linux or SteamOS (the operating system of the Steam Deck) .
It is also one of the oldest ‘distros’ —Having been released in 1993, it is only surpassed by Slackware and SUSE, both from 1992—, so added to the fact that it is also the one with the broadest support of hardware platforms, it is understandable that the release of each new version of Debian becomes an event in the Linux ‘world’.
And that is exactly what has happened this weekend, with the release of Debian 11 ‘Bullseye’, the successor to Debian 10 ‘Buster’ (released July 2019). In the case of the x86 64-bit edition, Debian carries a total of 59,551 packages, of which 11,294 are new, 42,821 have been updated, and 9,519 have been removed for various reasons.
The code name of the ‘distro’ continues its long tradition of honoring characters from the ‘Toy Story’ saga
One of the great novelties of ‘Bullseye’ is, of course, the replacement of kernel version 4.19 by version 5.10. This, among other new features (referring mainly to modern hardware support), provides Debian with native support for Microsoft’s exFAT filesystem, without the need to resort to FUSE.
This version also includes notable improvements in the area of print and scan support, including support to use the devices without the need for drivers in CUPS and SANE, as well as implement the IPP-over-USB protocol (to use devices connected via USB treating them as if they were network devices).
Available software
Debian supports virtually all desktop environments available for Linux, but ‘only’ six of them are available during the installation process: GNOME 3.38, KDE Plasma 5.20, LXDE 11, LXQt 0.16, MATE 1.24 and Xfce 4.16.
As to desktop apps, Debian 11 brings us the following versions of the most popular applications: LibreOffice 7, Calligra 3.2, GNUcash 4.4, GIMP 2.10.22, Inkscape 1.0.2, Emacs 27.1, Krita 4.4.2, Kdenlive 20.12.3, Shotcut 21.01.29 and VLC 3.0.16.
And, in regards to server applications, this is the list of the most outstanding ones: Apache 2.4.46, BIND 9.16, Nginx 1.18, lighttpd 1.4.59, MariaDB 10.5, OpenSSH 8.4p1, PHP 7.4, PostgreSQL 13 and Samba 4.13.
How to upgrade to Debian 11
Most of the users who have already tried it stand out the ease and reliability of the migration process to Debian 11 from Debian 10. The process is simple …
First we update the system:
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
Next, we make sure we have the package installed gcc-8-base:
sudo apt install gcc-8-base
Then, we open the text file /etc/apt/sources.list with our favorite editor (run as root), we commented each of the lines of text present (adding the symbol ‘#’ at the beginning) and paste these new, corresponding to the repositories of the new version:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian bullseye-backports main contrib non-free
After that, we close the editor and we update the system again using the following commands:
sudo apt clean all
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
The process will be – in most installations – long, so be patient and do not think about canceling it once started. When finished (possibly a configuration screen will appear before doing so), restart your system … and say hello to your new Debian 11.