Debian 11 is Now Available

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.

Conversation 15 comments

  • Paul Thurrott

    Premium Member
    15 August, 2021 - 4:58 pm

    <p>I wasn’t sure if this warranted a normal news story, so what the heck.</p>

    • navarac

      16 August, 2021 - 3:10 am

      <p>It does, and thank you, Paul. I think Linux is as relevant on your site as all the Apple news you report on.</p>

    • curtisspendlove

      18 August, 2021 - 5:05 pm

      <p>I’d definitely be interested in having a bit more Linux (and even Mac) coverage on the site. </p><p><br></p><p>Particularly from a “does this make sense for a Windows guy” perspective. </p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    16 August, 2021 - 12:22 am

    <p>Debian is the old, reliable and steady distribution. This is great news for Debian users, but they are just catching up to where the rest of the Linux world was for a few months.</p><p><br></p><p>If you want a steady, stable and well supported distribution, this is the place to go. We used it, when I was a Greenbone Systems (they wrote and maintain openVAS as well as the commercial GSM version and the feeds for security vulnerabilities). Debian provides the basis for their hardware appliances.</p><p><br></p><p>For their high performance, stable systems, they used Gentoo, but for everything else, it was Debian. (It is amazing to watch a virtual machine be given access to all 96 cores of the server to compile Gentoo, then drop it back down to 4 or 8 cores for normal use!)</p><p><br></p><p>Debian also provides the basis for distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint and many other popular distributions. So those features will trickle down to those distributions in their next releases.</p>

    • hrlngrv

      Premium Member
      16 August, 2021 - 12:54 am

      <p>I don’t believe Debian <strong><em>stable</em></strong> has all that much relevance to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc. If it did, then prior to Debian announcing Bullseye, Buster would have been the current stable version, with the 4.9.x kernel, but Ubuntu and Linux Mint and some others have been using 5.x kernels since early 2020. OTOH, Debian testing might be more relevant, and Debian PPAs are certainly important for other distributions which sprung from Debian.</p>

      • hrlngrv

        Premium Member
        16 August, 2021 - 12:55 am

        <p>GRRRRRRRRR!</p><p><br></p><p>s/4.9.x/4.19.x/</p>

        • navarac

          16 August, 2021 - 6:42 am

          <p>GGRRRR? Yes – guys, can we have the ability to edit our own posts back, please.</p>

          • lwetzel

            Premium Member
            17 August, 2021 - 10:52 am

            <p>Suggest you send a note to support about this.</p>

    • waethorn

      16 August, 2021 - 3:15 pm

      <p>If you want stable and modern, Fedora is the way to go. Many of the common Linux component teams are organized by Red Hat paid employees. Red Hat contributes the most resources of any company to the Linux software ecosystem. Fedora is also the distro that Torvalds uses.</p>

      • navarac

        17 August, 2021 - 7:34 am

        <p>Sorry, I don’t want a Linux Distro that is supported, controlled or has any other interest of a corporate body. We have enough of that control over us with Microsoft and Apple. Oh, and Google with ChromeOS as well for that matter.</p>

        • waethorn

          17 August, 2021 - 10:00 am

          <p>If you didn’t, nothing would get done. You’d probably still be on Hurd, and where is that now?</p>

          • navarac

            17 August, 2021 - 10:13 am

            <p>I get plenty done, thanks all the same :-)</p>

          • hrlngrv

            Premium Member
            17 August, 2021 - 4:17 pm

            <p>There are also several BSDs, FWIW.</p><p><br></p><p>There are only 4 things which distinguish Linux distributions: 1) whether package repositories contain non-FOSS packages, 2) which package format and manager it uses, 3) default packages included in new installs (which becomes meaningless after a few months of adding and purging packages to suit oneself), 4) speed of adding updated packages to package repositories. Dunno about Fedora with respect to (1), but Debian is pretty rigorous about FOSS. Fedora and Debian definitely differ with respect to (2), and anyone used to dpkg/apt would be likely to prefer Debian to Fedora. While it may take Debian a long time to crank out new stable versions, the Debian community is as fast as the Fedora community at keeping packages up to date. Other than package manager, it’s not that difficult to configure otherwise identical Fedora and Debian systems.</p>

  • F4IL

    16 August, 2021 - 7:58 pm

    <p>New debian releases are generally considered a <em>big deal</em> since they form the foundation of so many systems (including commercial ones like ubuntu) across a wide range of CPU architectures.</p><p><br></p><p>Also of note is the fact that the project is primarily driven by an enthusiastic community of hackers, volunteers and enthusiasts.</p>

  • phjeong

    18 August, 2021 - 10:11 pm

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I hope that this works out with the places that we talked about since there are changes that have been made. It’s really cool that there are systems that are in place since there are people who will have trouble with the stuff that we can talk about with the stuff that we see and it’s really weird here right?</span></p>

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