After over two years of development, the Debian community has released Debian 11 “bullseye.” The new release of this Linux distribution will be supported for five years.
“’bullseye’ [is] our first release to provide a Linux kernel with support for the exFAT filesystem and defaults to using it for mounting exFAT filesystems,” the release notes explain. “Most modern printers are able to use driverless printing and scanning without the need for vendor-specific (often non-free) drivers. [And] ‘bullseye’ … allows a USB [printer] to be treated as a network device.”
Debian’s goal is to be what it calls “The Universal Operating System,” and the community-based organization claims that its broad support for software packages and hardware architectures in version 11 support that goal. “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,” the release notes continue. “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.”
As with most other mainstream Linux distributions, interested parties can try Debian 11 without first installing it using a live image that runs in a read-only state using your PC’s RAM. But you can, of course, install it via USB, Blu-ray, DVD, CD, or a network connection. Users on Debian 10 can upgrade with the bundled APT package management tool.
You can learn more about Debian 11 from the Debian website, which is a bit more old-school than some of the newer and trendier Linux distributions.