Debian 11 GNU/Linux 11
Mayank Sharma can’t help but marvel at one of the oldest Linux distros, which continues to be as riveting as it was almost three decades ago.
Mayank Sharma can only marvel at one of the oldest distros, which continues to be as riveting as it was almost three decades ago.
Debian 11 (codename Bullseye) has just entered full freeze, and while the final release might not have arrived even by the time you’re flipping through this issue, it’s surely just around the corner.
Unlike some of the other distros that bring in a raft of new changes, Debian releases are conservative by nature. So while Bullseye has a ton of new things compared to Buster (which came out in 2019), most if not all have already made landfall in several other mainstream distros.
Then there’s Debian’s release and support cycles, which is a far cry from the one adopted by most desktop distros. While the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu will put out multiple releases in a year, and support them for between nine and 13 months, Debian supports its releases for five years. Furthermore, Debian 12 won’t arrive for at least two years, which means the distro will look increasingly outdated.
One of the best things about Debian is its extensive software repository and Debian 11 is no different. Since Debian 1.1, which included 486 packages, the total number of packages in each Debian stable version has grown exponentially. In fact, Bullseye includes over 13,370 new packages compared to Debian 10, bringing the total number of packages to over 57,000.
Behind the scenes, Bullseye introduces driverless printing and scanning thanks to the support for the vendor neutral IPP-over-USB protocol, which extends the advantages of driverless network printing to devices connected via USB.
The release also ships with the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, which will be supported until 2026. One of the advantages this kernel brings to Debian is built-in support for the exFAT filesystem.
On the desktop front, Debian 11 as usual ships with several desktop environments, and you’ll find virtually all open source graphical applications in its repos. It’s also worth noting that Debian 11 supports a total of nine architectures, including the 32-bit i386 that’s been abandoned by most other distros.
Principled approach
In addition to taking on new packages, Debian 11 has also dropped over 7,000 packages from its repositories for various reasons. Notable exclusions include the LILO boot loader, which hasn’t kept up with the times and has been replaced by the more feature-rich GRUB boot loader. Bullseye also doesn’t include the Chef configuration manager, because of copyright issues.
Perhaps the one aspect that’s helped define Debian, but has also led to some notable disagreements in the project, are its governing principles as outlined in its constitution, social contract and policy documents.
From the very beginning the project has adopted a disciplined approach as mentioned in its social contract, which has created friction both outside and inside the project. For instance, Debian was involved in a decadelong cold-war with Mozilla, that started when the distribution refused to use the Firefox logo because it was incompatible with Debian’s free software guidelines. It led to the creation of the IceWeasel browser, together with several other Ice-prefixed forks of Mozilla software.
The other major rocking-the-boat moment for the project was the switch to Systemd system and service manager, which led to the birth of the Devuan distro.
The use of Systemd resulted in a long, technical and much-publicised debate that caused many notable Debian developers to tune down their involvement with the project, including Ian Jackson, the author of Debian’s dpkg package management tool.
Still, even almost three decades of development have been unable to rob Debian of its enigmatic charm and the distro continues to be managed with the same passion and fervour as it was when it came into being in the previous century.