Debian 10 buster released

July 6th, 2019

After 25 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 10 (code name buster ), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.

Debian 10 buster ships with several desktop applications and environments. Amongst others it now includes the desktop environments:

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 defaults to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. Wayland has a simpler and more modern design, which has advantages for security. However, the Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session.

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.

For those in security-sensitive environments AppArmor, a mandatory access control framework for restricting programs' capabilities, is installed and enabled by default. Furthermore, all methods provided by 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 is based on the nftables framework by default in Debian 10 buster . Starting with iptables v1.8.2 the binary package includes iptables-nft and iptables-legacy, two variants of the iptables command line interface. The nftables-based variant uses the nf_tables Linux kernel subsystem. The alternatives system can be used to choose between the variants.

The UEFI ( Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ) support first introduced in Debian 7 (code name wheezy ) continues to be greatly improved in Debian 10 buster . Secure Boot support is included in this release for amd64, i386 and arm64 architectures and should work out of the box on most Secure Boot-enabled machines. This means users should no longer need to disable Secure Boot support in the firmware configuration.

The cups and cups-filters packages are installed by default in Debian 10 buster , giving users everything that is needed to take advantage of driverless printing. Network print queues and IPP printers will be automatically set up and managed by cups-browsed and the use of non-free vendor printing drivers and plugins can be dispensed with.

Debian 10 buster includes numerous updated software packages (over 62% of all packages in the previous release), such as:

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

more than 59,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 29,000 source packages.

With this broad selection of packages and its traditional wide architecture support, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. 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. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian's archive ensure that buster fulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release.

A total of ten architectures are supported: 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 ( amd64 ), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 ( i386 ), 64-bit little-endian Motorola/IBM PowerPC ( ppc64el ), 64-bit IBM S/390 ( s390x ), for ARM, armel and armhf for older and more recent 32-bit hardware, plus arm64 for the 64-bit AArch64 architecture, and for MIPS, mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian) architectures for 32-bit hardware and mips64el architecture for 64-bit little-endian hardware.

Want to give it a try?

If you simply want to try Debian 10 buster without installing it, you can use one of the available live images which load and run the complete operating system in a read-only state via your computer's memory.

These live images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures and are available for DVDs, USB sticks, and netboot setups. The user can choose among different desktop environments to try: Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, MATE, Xfce and, new in buster, LXQt. Debian Live Buster re-introduces the standard live image, so it is also possible to try a base Debian system without any graphical user interface.

Should you enjoy the operating system you have the option of installing from the live image onto your computer's hard disk. The live image includes the Calamares independent installer as well as the standard Debian Installer. More information is available in the release notes and the live install images sections of the Debian website.

To install Debian 10 buster directly onto your computer's hard disk you can choose from a variety of installation media such as Blu-ray Disc, DVD, CD, USB stick, or via a network connection. Several desktop environments — Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce — may be installed through those images. In addition, multi-architecture CDs are available which support installation from a choice of architectures from a single disc. Or you can always create bootable USB installation media (see the Installation Guide for more details).

For cloud users, Debian offers direct support for many of the best-known cloud platforms. Official Debian images are easily selected through each image marketplace. Debian also publishes pre-built OpenStack images for the amd64 and arm64 architectures, ready to download and use in local cloud setups.

Debian can now be installed in 76 languages, with most of them available in both text-based and graphical user interfaces.

The installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent (the recommended method), jigdo, or HTTP; see Debian on CDs for further information. Buster will soon be available on physical DVD, CD-ROM, and Blu-ray Discs from numerous vendors too.

Upgrading Debian

Upgrades to Debian 10 from the previous release, Debian 9 (code name stretch ) are automatically handled by the apt package management tool for most configurations. As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes as well as the installation guide for possible issues, and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The release notes will be further improved and translated to additional languages in the weeks after the release.

About Debian

Debian is a free operating system, developed by thousands of volunteers from all over the world who collaborate via the Internet. The Debian project's key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to the Debian Social Contract and Free Software, and its commitment to provide the best operating system possible. This new release is another important step in that direction.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.