Debian 10 "Buster" Released

If you’re a recent owner of a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC, you should have had an early taste of Debian 10 “Buster”, since the Raspberry Pi Foundation decided to release their Raspbian “Buster” image before the actual release in order to lower software development costs. Debian developers have only just announced the release of Debian 10 “Buster”.

The new version of Debian supports various desktop environments including Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE .99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12.

Besides the official announcement Debian also posted tidbits on their Twitter feed, where we learn for example that “Debian 10 buster has 28,939 source packages with 11,610,055 source files”.

Officially supported architectures for Debian 10 include i386 and amd64 for x86 targets, arm64, armel and armhf Arm architectures, as well as various other architectures including MIPS (mips64el, mipsel…), PowerPC (ppc64el), and IBM System z (s390x).

One notable change is that GNOME defaults to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg, although the latter is still supported and installed by default. Wayland is said to offer a simpler and more modern design, as well as improved security. Talking about security, Debian 10 enables AppArmor by default (AppArmor is a mandatory access control framework for restricting programs’ capabilities), and UEFI improvements mean Secure Boot support is now included in this release for amd64, i386 and arm64 architectures.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can download one of the Live CD images, or if you already run Debian 9 “Stretch” upgrade with apt. Owners of Arm SBCs may want to check Armbian’s releases with Debian 10 instead unless you own a Raspberry Pi board in which case Rapsbian Buster is the way to go.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.