Saturday 6th July saw The Debian Project release version 10 of the Debian OS, codenamed “Buster”. I’ve long been a Debian fan, initially seduced by the vision of truly free software (not in the “free pie” sense!), and then over time, it’s simplistic approach to design and the fact it has grandfathered distro’s such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Kali.

Buster improves on desktop environment support with an impressive list of out-the-box options, with GNOME being the default:

• Cinnamon 3.8
• GNOME 3.30
• KDE Plasma 5.14
• LXDE 0.99.2
• LXQt 0.14
• MATE 1.20
• Xfce 4.12

Interestingly, GNOME defaults to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg, the end of an era perhaps? Having tested it out back in 2010 when it was a young promising project, I was impressed with the simplicity and modular design so am happy to see it’s making in-roads into the larger distributions (and some would argue Debian is by far the most picky when it comes to changes!)

Firefox ESR is installed by default, along with AppArmor for application control and security. Secure Boot via UEFI support has also improved dramatically, meaning users no longer need to disable it to get past the initial installation.

You can try Debian as a Live USB image here:

https://www.debian.org/CD/live/

Full release notes are available here:

https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/releasenotes