Debian 11 Bullseye Download with Better implementations of systemd and Wayland

Today is August 14, 2021, and as those who follow the news closely will know, it is the day of the release of Debian 11 Bullseye, Debian 11 Bullseye Download with Better implementations of systemd and Wayland, the new stable version of one of the most traditional distributions on the Linux scene. At this point, it goes without saying that we are above all an event, especially seeing that Debian has emerged as the great benchmark for community projects in a landscape that is increasingly dominated, at least in appearance, by corporations.

Two years after Buster, Debian 11 Bullseye is keen to continue the evolution of this prestigious distribution, which for many has laid the foundations of how a Linux operating system should work (and whose technology came to establish a strong dominance in the market. consumption through Ubuntu). Seeing the time elapsed and that the software stack remains watertight throughout the life of a stable version, what stands out the most are the updates of many of the components.

What’s New in Debian 11 Bullseye

Those responsible for the distribution say that the new version of the system, or at least the image destined to 64-bit x86, includes 11,294 new packages, adding up to a total of 59,551 for this occasion. 42,821 packages have been updated, which is 72% of all those supplied by Buster, while 9,519 have been removed for various reasons.

Regarding desktop environments, we find GNOME 3.38 , KDE Plasma 5.20 , LXDE 11, LXQt 0.16 , MATE 1.24 and Xfce 4.16 . Here we can highlight GNOME, since the supplied version not only maintains the session Wayland by default , but also offers in this sense a much more mature experience than that of Buster. The only thing that might be missing is the ability to screencast, but the Flatpak versions of OBS Studio and Kooha can cover that front (thankfully, PipeWire comes pre-installed with GNOME).

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Debian is one of the most successful distributions when it comes to letting the user choose the desktop they like the most, because it works well with almost anyone. This makes it capable of adapting to the diverse tastes of users when using a Linux operating system as a desktop.

Continuing with aspects related to the desktop, Debian 11 Bullseye offers from its repositories LibreOffice 7 , Calligra 3.2 , GNUcash 4.4, GIMP 2.10.22 , Inkscape 1.0.2 , Emacs 27.1, Krita 4.4.2, Kdenlive 20.12.3 , Shotcut 21.01 . 29 and VLC 3.0.16. At general levels we find a relatively recent software stack, but in case you want to have a newer version of any of the applications, you can resort to Flatpak or Snap.

But Debian not only encompasses the desktop, it is an operating system that tries to adapt to any purpose. Because of that, it is widely used in the field of servers, which is possibly where it stands out the most. Regarding server technologies, Bullseye makes available Apache 2.4.46, lighttpd 1.4.59, MariaDB 10.5, OpenSSH 8.4p1, PHP 7.4, PostgreSQL 13 and Samba 4.13 , while to develop software there are OpenJDK 11, GCC 10.2 .1 and LLVM / Clang 9.0.1 and 11.0.1 .

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To finish with the Debian 11 Bullseye news, we highlight the ‘open’ command as aliases of ‘xdg-open’ or ‘run-mailcap’ and the use of Linux 5.10 , which stands out, among other things, for including support for the system exFAT files from Microsoft. We remember that the kernel version is LTS, which could help those responsible for the distribution in its maintenance. However, although it is supposed to be a very tested version, it might not be very competent at making certain hardware work, such as the DualSense, which began to be officially supported as of Linux 5.12 .

Driverless printing and scanning support

Support for printers and scanners often ends up being a Linux nightmare, especially when it falls outside the HP spectrum. In order to reduce the potential complications that the user may encounter, Debian 11 Bullseye has incorporated driverless support for both CUPS printing and SANE scanning.

Many printers are able to connect via Ethernet or Wi-Fi and work without drivers, which has been implemented in CUPS and ‘cups-filters’. The system in question in this post has included a new package called ‘ipp-usb’, which is recommended by the CUPS daemon and uses the IPP-over-USB protocol to support many modern printers.

Basically, what IPP-over-USB does is treat a USB-connected device as if it were a network one, thus extending support for driverless operation to printers that connect to a USB port . The systemd service file supplied by the ‘ipp-usb’ package starts the daemon of the same name when a printer is connected to a USB port in order to prepare it for printing. Although CUPS should start the configuration automatically, there is also the possibility of performing the process manually.

Something similar happens for scanners as there are two backends for SANE for driverless support: ‘sane-escl’, supplied by ‘libsane1’, and ‘sane-airscan’, which is developed independently. Both support the eSCL protocol, but only the second has the ability to use the WSD protocol, so it is recommended for users to use both.

Because eSCL and WSD are protocols that work over a network, IPP-over-USB can be used to make USB-connected scanners work as if they were on a network. Here it is important to note that ‘libsane1’ has ‘ipp-usb’ as a recommended package.

system

Debian 11 Bullseye continues the maturation of the distribution’s systemd implementation. This time we find the default use of CgroupsV2 to have a unified hierarchy of control of resources. However, using kernel command line parameters it is possible to re-enable legacy Cgroups support.

On the other hand, we have the default enablement of the persistent journal functionality, which stores its files in ‘/ var / log / journal /’. The journal is readable on Debian by members of the ‘adm’ and ‘systemd-journal’ groups. This change should not interfere with any existing traditional logging deamon, such as rsyslog.

Download Debian 11 Bullseye .iso

The label of “universal operating system” comes not only from the fact that Debian is open to use for any purpose but also because of the large number of architectures it supports. However, here we will leave only the installer links for x86 32 and 64 bit:

• DVD – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .
• Cinnamon Live – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .
• GNOME Live – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .
• KDE Live – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .
• LXDE Live – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .
• LXQt Live – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .
• MATE Live – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .
• Xfce Live – Descarga directa: 32-bit , 64-bit | Torrent: 32-bit , 64-bit .

Debian defaults to a kernel devoid of proprietary firmware approved for the Linux kernel, so the installers will likely not boot on a wide variety of hardware, especially if an AMD Radeon graphics are involved. For this situation, you can resort to a image non-free , which are not official but are also hosted in the Debian domain.

Bullseye promises to be the best Debian release in a long time, to the extent that many say that, before entering the phase release candidate, it was already more stable than Buster when used as a desktop.