Debian 10 has been released, with the latest incarnation of the Linux distro being codenamed ‘Buster’ and bringing a number of improvements, not to mention a host of updated packages.
The developers note that Buster took just over two years to craft and hone to a stable version, and will be supported for the next five years going forward.
The OS ships with a variety of desktop environments, running with Gnome (3.30) with Wayland display server by default (but it also incorporates Cinnamon 3.8, KDE Plasma 5.14, Mate 1.20, Xfce 4.12 and more).
Secure Boot is supported in Debian 10 and should work out of the box, and the devs also observe: “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.”
Plentiful packages
As mentioned, a ton of software packages have been updated for Buster – almost two-thirds of the packages delivered with the previous release of Debian 9 (known as ‘Stretch’).
That includes Chromium 73.0, Firefox 60.7, GIMP 2.10.8, LibreOffice 6.1, Thunderbird 60.7.2, Perl 5.28, PHP 7.3, Python 3 3.7.2, Ruby 2.5.1 and much more (there are over 59,000 software packages in total).
Check here for full release notes, and you can grab Debian 10 live images here (which allow you to try the distro without installing it on your hard disk – although you can fully install the OS from the live image by following the instructions provided).
- Read our Debian 10.1 Buster review
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