Submitted by In this release, GNOME defaults to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. Wayland has a simpler and more modern design, which has advantages for security. However, the Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session.
Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 91% of the source packages included in Debian 10 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.
Debian forms the bedrock under many popular distributions, so any new Debian release is a major milestone, and will eventually find its way, in one form or another, to many Linux users’ computers.
Very interested about the Wayland thing. Is Ubuntu going to follow suit?
Debian has always been ultra conservative with stability trumping all else. Wayland/Gnome doesnt feel like it’s there in any incarnation I’ve used.
After 20 years of using Linux, on and off, I have settled with Debian for the most part.
It has the conservative badge which means that bug fixes go through the update mechanism and minor feature upgrades tend not to. The effect of this is that the amount of daily package updates is dramatically lower; a faustian bargain of sorts but worth noting if your internet linkage is tight.
For reasons I haven’t fully identified, the OS is lighter weight and as a result quick. Booting a 10yo machine from SSD is under 3 seconds after the POST, and brisk in use.
Even have STRETCH running on an ancient P3 laptop with 512MB RAM which is okay for some tasks …. usually one at a time but it is stable; which is further than OpenBSD got on the same machine.
BUSTER has a long list of version upgrades, for example PostgreSQL goes from 9.6 to 11.1; so that helps. On this front a switch to BUSTER feels overdue but this is the deal with Debian and it’s stability.
I pretty much started with Debian some 21 years ago and tried some others to see what they are like and always came back to Debian. I argee Debian is straight forward and always works.
That’s basically my story as well in addition to not needing a gui/desktop, and a lot of people I knew when I started using Linux were using it. The version lag can get ridiculous though. There have been times when I needed to use newer-than-semi-ancient versions Debian offered and updating things so that worked meant tons of Linux dependency hell breakage and a mountain of effort to hopefully fix it. I’m not talking about “bleeding edge” stuff either. Things can move very slow with Debian to the point (unintentional) neglect by package maintainers. On more than one occasion I’ve contacted people about updating packages that hadn’t seen one in 2-3+ years.
Overall Debian has served me well over the years. There can be a price to pay however if you need or want to use newer software than Debian offers but there’s no question its’ stability and light weight is a big plus.
I’ve used backports, pinning packages from testing and similar solutions many times.
Also the last 10+ years I’ve used Linux containers to run newer software when I needed it.
friedchicken,
+1 for entire post, my experience is virtually identical to yours 🙂
What the hell, they renamed ‘buster’ to ‘Buster’ on release, and thus broke rolling release and automatic security updates for everybody running Debian testing..
Why are you even using the name in the first place rather than “testing”? You never use the names.
Unless you use sid 😉
I did use testing. And still apt-get update complained the names behind the alias didn’t match.
The issue isn’t addressing by name. The issue is a new security measure refusing to continue to update when the underlying name changes.
because I want to stick to buster? Maybe I jumped the gun and switched to it while it was still testing because I wanted something newer, but don’t want to immediately get onto the bullseye train once buster goes stable? Maybe if it works and is doing something mundane I’d rather stick with it when it becomes oldstable?
There’s an interesting story behind this submission.
I’ve been reading OSNEWS for years and I believe this was the first story I’ve ever had published. Shortly after sending it to the queue I developed some crazy pain in my lower right abdomen and ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital where they preformed an emergency appendectomy on me. Luckily it hadn’t burst (but it slightly rupture during removal) so they were able to do laparoscopic surgery.
Just thought I’d share my last week with you all!
Jim