Software Update: Debian GNU/Linux 11.0

Debian is an open source operating system, which can be used for both desktops and servers, with an emphasis on stability and security. It is therefore used as the basis for various Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Version 11.x, codenamed ‘Bullseye’, is a so-called Long Term Support release and will be provided with updates over the next five years. More information about version 11 can be found on our front page, these are the release notes for this release:

Debian 11 bullseye released

After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. Debian 11 bullseye ships with several desktop applications and environments. Amongst others it now includes the desktop environments:

• gnome 3.38,
• KDE Plasma 5.20,
• LXDE 11,
• LXQt 0.16,
• DEGREE 1.24,
• Xfce 4.16.

This release contains over 11,294 new packages for a total count of 59,551 packages, along with a significant reduction of over 9,519 packages which were marked as obsolete and removed. 42,821 packages were updated and 5,434 packages remained unchanged.

bullseye becomes our first release to provide a Linux kernel with support for the exFAT filesystem and defaults to using it for mount exFAT filesystems. Consequently it is no longer required to use the filesystem-in-userspace implementation provided via the exfat-fuse package. Tools for creating and checking an exFAT filesystem are provided in the exfatprogs package.

Most modern printers are able to use driverless printing and scanning without the need for vendor specific (often non-free) drivers. bullseye brings forward a new package, ipp-usb, which uses the vendor neutral IPP-over-USB protocol supported by many modern printers. This allows a USB device to be treated as a network device. The official SANE driverless backend is provided by sane-escl in libsane1, which uses the eSCL protocol.

Systemd in bullseye activates its persistent journal functionality, by default, with an implicit fallback to volatile storage. This allows users that are not relying on special features to uninstall traditional logging daemons and switch over to using only the systemd journal.

The Debian Med team has been taking part in the fight against COVID-19 by packaging software for researching the virus on the sequence level and for fighting the pandemic with the tools used in epidemiology; this work will continue with focus on machine learning tools for both fields. The team’s work with Quality Assurance and Continuous integration is critical to the consistently reproducible results required in the sciences. Debian Med Blend has a range of performance critical applications which now benefit from SIMD Everywhere. To install packages maintained by the Debian Med team, install the metapackages named med-*, which are at version 3.6.x.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many other languages ​​now have a new Fcitx 5 input method, which is the successor of the popular Fcitx4 in buster; this new version has much better Wayland (default display manager) addon support.

Debian 11 bullseye includes numerous updated software packages (over 72% of all packages in the previous release), such as:

• Apache 2.4.48
• BIND DNS Server 9.16
• Calligra 3.2
• Crypt Setup 2.3
• Emacs 27.1
• GIMP 2.10.22
• GNU Compiler Collection 10.2
• GnuPG 2.2.20
• Inkscape 1.0.2
• LibreOffice 7.0
• Linux kernel 5.10 series
• MariaDB 10.5
• OpenSSH 8.4p1
• Perl 5.32
• PHP 7.4
• PostgreSQL 13
• Python 3, 3.9.1
• Rustc 1.48
• Samba 4.13
• Vim 8.2
• more than 59,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from more than 30,000 source packages.

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. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, and storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian’s archive ensure that bullseye fulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release.

A total of nine architectures are supported: 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit little-endian Motorola/IBM PowerPC (ppc64el), 64-bit IBM S/390 (s390x), for ARM, armel and armhf for older and more recent 32-bit hardware, plus arm64 for the 64-bit AArch64 architecture, and for MIPS, mipsel (little-endian) architectures for 32 -bit hardware and mips64el architecture for 64-bit little-endian hardware.