Debian 11 "bullseye" released

[ElementDave]

Debian 11 "bullseye" released​

"After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years..."

Bullseye was announced for release on August 14th, 2021, and replaces Buster as the new stable version.

Debian 11 (Bullseye) ships with the 5.10 series kernel.

Be sure to check the release notes for your platform.

In case you're upgrading, don't forget to update your APT source-list files to account for the changed security archive layout. This applies even if you have been using Debian testing.

More juicy details are available from the link to the official news.

 

[compslckr]

Got it installed tonight, and it's running great. It's actually been a while since I've played around with anything that has a GUI. Cinnamon looks great, and runs super smooth.

 

[Deadjasper]

Is Debian more primitive than distros derived from it. What would i gain or lose by switching from Mint to Debian?

TIA

 

[B00nie]

Is Debian more primitive than distros derived from it. What would i gain or lose by switching from Mint to Debian?

TIA

Debian is Mint without all the bells and whistles. You're going to have to configure things yourself on it. That might not be a bad thing though.

 

[FSCDiablo]

My Debian 11 KDE VBox VM boots at around 410MB RAM usage. Nice and clean, if I was going to change away from Manjaro for something different it would be Debian.

 

[ElementDave]

Is Debian more primitive than distros derived from it.

I definitely wouldn't describe Debian as more primitive in the sense that you probably mean. Debian is the "Universal Operating System"!

What would i gain or lose by switching from Mint to Debian?

I haven't personally used Mint so I don't want to make too many generalizations, but Debian is a more general-purpose OS, while Mint is clearly focused on the desktop experience. As such, the out-of-the-box desktop experience may appear more polished on a distribution like Mint or Ubuntu, though the default Debian desktop install works well enough in my experience.

I prefer to manually install only the bits I need instead and disable all unnecessary services. What I want from a desktop more than anything is for it to get out of my way and not do anything I don't explicitly tell it to. No harrassing notifications or popups. And of course a clock.

If you're presently using Mint and are satisfied with it, you might as well keep using it. If you're curious, you can always test Debian in a VM. And if you have any specific questions, fire away.

LWN maintains a comprehensive list of Linux distributions along with a brief summary accompanying each each distro. As of writing it includes 276 distributions. Here's recent article on Mint: Incremental improvements in Linux Mint 20.2.

 

[Deadjasper]

Mint 20.2 broke FreeDoom.

 

[ElementDave]

Got it installed tonight, and it's running great. It's actually been a while since I've played around with anything that has a GUI. Cinnamon looks great, and runs super smooth.

Glad to hear it. I switched my Debian VM over to the testing/Bullseye update channel about a year ago and haven't run into any complications.

Next official release (Debian 12) is codenamed "Bookworm".

 

[Algrim]

Debian is pickier about initial install until you choose the non-free tree. I had some quirks to work through getting Steam and Proton to work smoothly on Debian 10 than I would have if I just used Ubuntu… Once I get my desktop re-situated I might try Debian 11.

 

[ElementDave]

Debian is pickier about initial install until you choose the non-free tree. I had some quirks to work through getting Steam and Proton to work smoothly on Debian 10 than I would have if I just used Ubuntu… Once I get my desktop re-situated I might try Debian 11.

That's a good point. Debian's strong committal to its Free Software philosophy can sometimes complicate bare-metal installs, especially on laptops. Here's a link for current installation media that includes the non-free firmware:
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/current/

Installing Debian on modern hardware

 

[mullet]

Looks like Debian hit the target with bullseye.