The Debian project has released the first stable version of Debian 11 ‘Bullseye’. This version of the OS appeared more than two years after Debian 10 and brings several improvements, including support for the exFAT file system.
Among other things, Debian 11 gets a new theme, called Homeworld. That theme was selected after a poll among users, in which that option was rated as the most popular. The Homeworld theme is minimalist and inspired by the bauhaus movement that started at the beginning of the last century.
The new version also comes with several updated package bases, according to the release notes. This package base consists of more than 59,000 packages, with which this release brings more than 11,000 new packages and also contains newer versions of existing packages, such as LibreOffice, GIMP, Nginx, Inkscape, PHP and more. The OS also ships with and version 5.10 of the Linux kernel. That is an LTS version, which will be supported until December 2026. Debian 10 used Linux 4.19.
With the new kernel, the OS will receive support for the exFAT file system, which is intended for flash storage, among other things. Debian 11 supports driverless printing via IPP-USB and uses yescrypt hashing by default.
The release of Debian 11 comes just before the operating system’s 28th anniversary. Ian Murdock announced on August 16, 1993 that the release of his Debian Linux Release was near, with Debian 0.01 coming out on September 15 of the same year. The first stable release followed in 1996. The Linux-based operating system is now very popular. Among other things, Debian forms the basis for several other popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.