Debian 10 Buster: Debian is one of my favorite distributions, for many reasons that I have mentioned from time to time. It is developed by an entirely volunteer organization dedicated to developing free software and promoting the ideals of the Free Software community.
Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions in the world and, in terms of the number of developers involved, it has one of the largest communities. Around 1,300 contributors worked on Debian 10, which was released on July 6th.
Debian 10 Buster offers package upgrades across the entire operating system, but the main changes in this release include enabling AppArmor by default and running GNOME Shell on Wayland.
GNOME running X.Org is available as an alternative desktop method. The release announcement also states that nftables can be used to manage an operating system firewall and that Secure Boot is enabled for certain architectures only. This release of Debian will have a total of five years of support, thanks to the long-term support team.
The new version of Debian, codenamed “Buster,” runs on a wide range of processor architectures and is available in net-install, full DVD installation, and seven live desktop versions. This gives users a wide range of installation options.
Although not mentioned in the release announcement, Debian installation media does not include non-free firmware that is often required for wireless networking. So those of you considering trying the distribution will need to install the firmware required to get wireless networking. Of course, there are unofficial live ISOs with non-free firmware.
Debian has gained a reputation for the stability of the distribution it develops but also for its very good performance.
It starts quickly, and GNOME has a relatively small disk and memory footprint. The software it comes with by default is reliable, which makes Debian a very reliable operating system for both desktops and servers.
Debian runs on many hardware architectures, offers many desktop options, and provides a huge amount of software packages. It can work with portable package formats, many kernel types, and is small enough to run in many different environments. It is surprisingly flexible.
There are some negative consequences to Debian's balance of stability and flexibility. One is that packages in the Stable channel are often very old compared to the same software in other distributions. Almost every package is at least six months old at the time of release, while some are a year old. So for those who want to run the latest software released, the stable versions of Debian are not ideal.
For me, Debian doesn't offer a modern design. Some distributions focus heavily on UI design, but Debian seems to do the exact opposite, while providing a wide selection of packages and tools to design the UI you want yourself.
We can describe the difference as if you have a new model car and a car made with Lego. The former has a clear design, while the latter lets you play around.
In short, I am very happy with Debian 10 Buster, which I have been using since it was in the testing channel. It has some minor issues, with GNOME software and the lack of non-free firmware.
Or, more specifically, the non-free firmware is hidden and you will need to add it to sources.list .
However, the performance, the abundance of software, the support for a lot of CPU architectures, and the low resource usage make this version very good.
I wouldn't recommend Debian to a new Linux user, because it requires manual intervention to get the system working. Intermediate and experienced Linux users will be very happy.
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