In June, it was announced that Debian 10, codenamed Buster, was due out today, July 6. At the time of writing, the Debian community were still testing ISOs, according to the Micronews feed. While we wait for the final ISOs, we’ve got our hands on the Debian 10 release notes which explain what’s new in this update.
The first thing worth mentioning are the architectures which Debian 10 is available for. The new update is targeting 32-bit PC (i386) and 64-bit PC (amd64), 64-bit ARM (arm64), ARM EABI (armel), ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el), 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el), and IBM System z (s390x).
As is typically the case with Debian releases, Debian 10 comes with even more new packages than before; this update includes 13,370 new packages, bringing the grand total to 57,703 packages. Since Debian 9, 35,532 packages were upgraded, while 7,278 have been removed from the distribution. Removed packages will be marked as obsolete in package management tools.
Some of the major software upgrades in Debian 10 pertains to desktop environments, depending on which edition you download, these are the desktop versions included with this upgrade: GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, Cinnamon 3.8, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12. Debian 10 marks the first Debian release which includes LXQt live ISOs as a new flavour, LXQt is a lightweight environment that runs well on older hardware. Those using the GNOME desktop will be interested to know that Wayland will be the default display server but Xorg is still installed by default.
Some popular end-user software packages have been updated, these include LibreOffice 6.1, Calligra 3.1, GNUcash 3.4, Firefox, Python 3.7.2, Rustc 1.34, MariaDB 10.3, GNU CC 7.4 & 8.3, Emacs 26.1, Linux kernel 4.19, and GIMP 2.10.8.
The release of Debian 10 is imminent but last minute testing is on-going. It’s recommended that you watch the Debian Micronews feed or the Debian homepage for more information but expect the final release today. Those of you that don't normally run Debian, but want to test Debian 10, will be better off downloading the unofficial nonfree ISO which includes more hardware drivers for things like graphics cards and wireless devices; unfortunately, you'll have to wait a bit longer for these ISOs.
Update: Debian 10 has been released.
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