The Long-Awaited and Powerful Debian 11: What’s New?

Debian 11 Evolution

Debian Updated to its latest version – 11 bullseye. Its last release took place in 2 years, 1 month and 9 days. It was such a long period that Debian was left without very important updates for its active users. According to official data, this version of the Linux distribution will be supported for the next 5 years. This is thanks to the collaboration between the this OS Security Team and the Long Term Support Team.

Debian 11, or Bullseye as it is called, was released on August 14, 2021. It is based on the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel and will be supported for five years. On November 12, 2020, after winning an open poll with eighteen options, it was announced that Juliet Taka’s “Homeworld” would be the default theme for Debian 11. Bullseye ditched the remaining Qt4 libraries, and also KDE 4 and Python 2. First freeze code, preparation of Debian 11 for release began on January 12, 2021. Bullseye does not support older 32-bit big endian MIPS architectures.

Bbullseye is also called one of the most stable Linux distributions. This is reflected in its super-fast performance and its system updates. I would like to touch on the performance in this version of Linus (compared to 10 version) due to the new kernel. This means that the operating system is getting such a huge performance boost. The developers set a task to improve the performance of bullseye and it seems – they succeeded! Once installed, you have the choice to launch one of your chosen desktops and after that you notice that you need to run GNOME on either legacy X11 or Wayland (the default).

Important and Interesting Updates

Debian’s official website provides very interesting information that displays new updates.
Debian 11 bullseye includes many updated software packages (over 72% of all packages from the previous release). These are packages such as:

• GIMP 2.10.22
• GNU Compiler Collection 10.2
• GnuPG 2.2.20
• Inkscape 1.0.2
• LibreOffice 7.0
• Linux kernel 5.10 series
• MariaDB 10.5
• OpenSSH 8.4p1
• Perl 5.32
• Apache 2.4.48
• BIND DNS Server 9.16
• Rustc 1.48
• Samba 4.13
• Vim 8.2
• Calligra 3.2
• Cryptsetup 2

With such a wide range of packages and, as usual, a large number of supported architectures, this OS remains true to its goal of being a universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: desktops and netbooks; for development servers and cluster systems; for databases, web and storage servers.

At the same time, additional quality efforts, such as automated installation and update testing for all packages in the Debian archive, ensure that bullseye meets the high expectations users have for a stable release. As with all versions of Linux distributions, a new kernel has appeared – now it is version 5.10. As for Systemd – now writes its own journal using systemd-journald. Сgroups has been updated to version v2. It will not be difficult to upgrade from version 10 to version 11 of this distribution kit.

Easy Upgrade to Bullseye

First, you need to prepare your operating system for updates:

dpkg --get-selections "*" 

Then a full system update:

apt update && apt upgrade && apt dist-upgrade && apt --purge autoremove

Next is a very important point related to updating the repositories. This concerns the /etc/apt/sources.list directory. Changes to bullseye will be required.

deb http://security.debian.org/ buster/updates main

Then the process of updating the operating system to version 11 itself. Please follow the commands:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt dist-upgrade
reboot

This completes the update process. In general, updating Debian from release to release is done routinely and is not a complicated procedure. But this is provided that there are no dependency conflicts and support for various software of the new version. The problems are likely to be elsewhere and are related to the software. The new system receives updated versions of all software. Somewhere the config may change, somewhere the source code of the site does not support working with the new version of php or the Database. Also, you can download the release on the official Debian website.

At the same time, a new release of the previous stable branch, Debian 10.11, is available, which includes 55 updates fixing stability issues and 50 updates fixing vulnerabilities. The birdtray packages have been excluded from the repository (the add-on has lost compatibility with the current version of Thunderbird) and libprotocol-acme-perl (only supports the old version of the ACME protocol).