Debian 10 codenamed ‘buster’ released, along with Debian GNU/Hurd 2019 as a port

What's new in Debian 10

Wayland display server

In this release, GNOME will use the Wayland display server by default, instead of Xorg. Wayland’s simple and modern design provides advantages in terms of security. The Xorg display server is installed in Debian 10, by default. Users can use the default display manager to change the display server in their session.

Reproducible Builds project

In Debian 10, the Reproducible Builds project plans to have over 91% of the source packages  built in bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This will work as an important verification feature for users as it will protect them against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. 

Desktop applications

Debian 10 “buster” ships with several desktop applications and environments. Some of the desktop environments include:

• Cinnamon 3.8
• GNOME 3.30
• KDE Plasma 5.14
• LXDE 0.99.2

Other highlights in Debian 10

• AppArmor, a mandatory access control framework for restricting programs' capabilities, is installed and enabled by default for security-sensitive environments.
• All methods provided by Advanced Package Tool (APT) (except cdrom, gpgv, and rsh) can optionally make use of seccomp-BPF sandboxing. The https method for APT is included in the apt package and does not need to be installed separately. 
• Network filtering, based on the nftables framework is set by default. Starting with iptables v1.8.2, the binary package includes two variants of the iptables command line interface: iptables-nft and iptables-legacy.
• The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which is a specification for a software program that connects a computer's firmware to its operating system, introduced in Debian 7, has been greatly improved in Debian 10. 
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• The Secure Boot support is included in this release for amd64, i386 and arm64 architectures and will work on most Secure Boot-enabled machines. This means that users will not have to disable the Secure Boot support in the firmware configuration.
• The cups and cups-filters packages installed by default in Debian 10, allows users to take advantage of driverless printing. 
• This release includes numerous updated software packages such as Apache 2.4.38, BIND DNS Server 9.11, Chromium 73.0, Emacs 26.1, Firefox 60.7 and more. 

Visit the Debian official website, for more details on Debian 10.

What’s new in Debian GNU/Hurd 2019

• An Advanced Configuration and Power Interface Specification (ACPI) translator has been made available, it is currently only used to shut down the system. 
• The LwIP TCP/IP stack, which is a widely used open-source TCP/IP stack designed for embedded systems, is now available as an option. 
• A Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) arbiter has been introduced and will be useful to properly manage PCI access, as well as to provide fine-grain hardware access.  
• New optimizations now include protected payloads, better paging management and message dispatch, and gsync synchronization. 
• Support for LLVM has also been introduced. 
• Besides the Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available for installing ISO images. 

The general reaction to both the Debian news has been positive with users praising Debian for always staying up to date with the latest features.

A Redditor says, “Through the years I've seen many a "popular" distro come and go, yet Debian remains.”

Another user on Hacker News adds, “I left Redhat at 8.0(long time ago, before Fedora) and started using debian/ubuntu and never looked back, in my opinion, while Redhat made a fortune by its business model, Debian and ubuntu are the true community OS, I can't ask for more.

Debian has been my primary Server for the last 15 years, life is good with them. Thank you so much to the maintainers and contributors for putting so much effort into them.”

Read the Debian mailing list, for more information on Debian GNU/Hurd.

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