Debian 10 releases: codenamed “Buster”
On July 6th, 2019, Debian officially released the 10th largest version of the stable branch. This codenamed version is “buster” and will have a five-year support period.
Debian 10 is equipped with multiple desktop environments, including Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, Xfce 4.12. In this release, GNOME uses the Wayland display server by default instead of Xorg. Wayland has a simpler and more modern design with security advantages. But at the same time, the Xorg display server is also installed by default, so users can choose from the display manager as needed.
“Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 91% of the source packages included in Debian 10 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.”
Debian 10 installs and enables the AppArmor kernel security module by default, allowing system administrators to impose restrictions on network access, file permissions, etc. for individual programs.
In Debian 10, network filtering is based on nftables by default. As of iptables v1.8.2, the package provides variants of the iptables-nft and iptables-legacy command-line interfaces. The nftables-based variant uses the nf_tables kernel subsystem.
UEFI has been introduced in Debian 7. This version greatly improves support for UEFI. In addition, the three architectures amd64, i386, and arm64 also support Secure Boot. Users no longer have to turn off Secure Boot to use Debian.
Debian 10 installs the cups and cups-filters packages by default, making it easy for users to use the printer directly without having to manually install the package.
Compared to the previous version, Debian 10 upgraded 62% of packages, for example:
- Apache 2.4.38
- BIND DNS Server 9.11
- Chromium 73.0
- Emacs 26.1
- Firefox 60.7 (in the firefox-esr package)
- GIMP 2.10.8
- GNU Compiler Collection 7.4 and 8.3
- GnuPG 2.2
- Golang 1.11
- Inkscape 0.92.4
- LibreOffice 6.1
- Linux 4.19 series
- MariaDB 10.3
- OpenJDK 11
- Perl 5.28
- PHP 7.3
- PostgreSQL 11
- Python 3 3.7.2
- Ruby 2.5.1
- Rustc 1.34
- Samba 4.9
- Systemd 241
- Thunderbird 60.7.2
- Vim 8.1
- And other 59000 packages
Debian 10 supports ten different processor architectures: AMD64, AArch64, armel, armhf, i386, MIPS/MIPSel, MIPS64el, ppc64el, s390x.
