Notable changes and additions in Debian 11 'Bullseye'

You may not know it, but Debian is one of the oldest, most stable and flexible Linux distributions in the free and open source world. Born in 1993, Debian is considered a precursor to many other Linux distributions, as well as serving as the foundation for Ubuntu, the most popular Linux desktop version today.

With the major update Debian 11 'Bullseye' just released in beta, this long-standing operating system has become a name that has received a lot of attention in the Linux world lately. Let's take a look at the most notable major changes, additions, and improvements on Debian 11 below.

New interface theme

The first thing that you will notice on Debian 11 Bullseye is the arrival of a new theme called Homeworld. This theme pack is inspired by the Bauhaus movement of the early 20th century, with a minimalist philosophy and the main color is dark blue, combined with geometric motifs that are simple but not monotonous.

You will see the new theme integrated not only in the installer and on the desktop, but also in the GRUB menu and the Debian web pages.

Upgrade Kernel

The Linux kernel (Linux kernel) in Bullseye has been upgraded from 4.19 to 5.10. This is an impressive leap for Debian, especially considering the fact that so many other distributions have been at or above kernel 5.4 for a while.

Newer Linux kernels often offer better hardware support, especially if users are also using next-generation hardware setups. Besides, the ability to manage the system's resource usage will also be more efficient, along with many small bug fixes.

Update base package

Debian 11 Bullseye includes an updated base package, with more than half of the packages present in its predecessor Buster having been upgraded. The total number of packages rounds up to a whopping 58,000.

Popular packages updated include LibreOffice moving to 7.0, Calligra moving to 3.2 and GIMP moving to 2.10.22. Notably, you'll find the GNOME (DE) desktop environment currently at version 3.38, while modern distributions like Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 21.04 are offering GNOME 40.

Other standard Debian DEs are also being upgraded, including Xfce to 4.16, LXDE to version 11, LXQt to 0.16, MATE to 1.24 and KDE Plasma to 5.20.

Improvements in print and scan features

Printing and scanning will become easier on Debian 11 thanks to improvements in the CUPS and SANE utilities.

Some printers and scanners require special, sometimes proprietary, drivers to work with any given device. Such requests can turn into problems.

CUPS and SANE, the printer and scanner management utilities on Debian, are now upgraded to better handle the above problems, especially for commercially available scanning or printing devices. in the past 5 years or so.

Improved password security

Debian 11 is replacing the default encryption algorithm for local account passwords with yescrypt. Earlier Buster versions used SHA-512 by default and did not support yescrypt. This change addresses some of the security and efficiency concerns seen in SHA-256 and SHA-512.

ExFAT . file system support

Previous Debian versions relied on a special solution, Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE), to mount and use exFAT-formatted drives. With the new kernel, exFAT partitions are being supported exclusively on Debian 11 Bullseye.

This will help those who regularly deal with formatted removable hard drives on Windows or macOS devices. You should see your exFAT drives mounted without any problems. Additionally, the 'exfatprogs' package will also allow you to create your own exFAT partitions.

This article covers only a small portion of the notable changes in Debian 11. For a complete overview, you can refer to the update's official release notes HERE. If you are using Debian 10 and want to upgrade, follow the official instructions from the development team HERE.