On Saturday, the Debian project released two new updates for Debian 9 and Debian 8, bumping them up to 9.1 and 8.9 respectively. The updates aren’t too significant but they do come with patched software for bugs which were present in the previous releases. In addition, it means if you want to do a clean install of Debian, you won’t have a ton of updates to download and install from the update manager as those are rolled into the new releases.
It’s possible to update your current installs to Debian 9.1 or 8.9 by simply applying any available updates. You can do this by heading over to the terminal and running ‘apt-get update’ followed by ‘apt-get upgrade’ - this will search for and install any available updates but make sure you have privileges to enact updates before you start.
Debian 9.1 includes 26 security updates and 54 miscellaneous bug fixes, it also removes the aiccu package which was made redundant following the termination of the SixXS package. Meanwhile, Debian 8.9 includes 68 security fixes and 53 miscellaneous bug fixes and also removes eight packages since the last release.
Debian 9 was released about one month ago in June on the back of 26 months of development. The plan is for the release to be the main focus for three years where it’ll continually be updated. After those three years, security updates will become the responsibility of the long term support team who will keep the release chugging along for an additional two years; overall you’ll be good to run this release for five years in total.
Source: Debian