Debian 11 Is Releasing This Weekend With Many Improvements

[waxhead]

Debian is among the most outdated/lazy Linux distributions in existence. For example:

• Debian 10 (current): Xfce 4.12 (released 2015-02-28)
• Debian 11 (to be released): Xfce 4.16

Well your comment is also one of the the most outdated/lazy perpetual repetitive nonsense in existence. For example:

• Debian has three primary distros...
  • STABLE
    • Great for servers - where any sane sysop would prefer rock solid things that just work!
  • Testing
    • Great for desktop - essentially a rolling release, very up to date.
  • Unstable
    • Great for those who like changes, good or bad.

Failure to think and/or understand cause people to not understand that the testing release is essentially the same as a rolling release. That might be a good thing I guess, as it keep certain people away from Debian. I used to think that it was a bad thing for Debian to use the name testing instead of rolling , but I am not so sure anymore.

[Phil995511]

I really like Debian, but I can never recommend it to anyone. I know it's great for stability, but being stuck with old kernels and old software stacks like GNOME (it's already outdated and Debian 11 hasn't been released yet...) for two or more years makes installing it on new hardware impossible.

I know you can backport new kernel releases and new software, but I really feel this should be different somehow. Being not able to install Debian 10 on my year-old Renoir laptop because it's still using the old 4.19 kernel seems off.

You seem to forget that there is the Backports directory to get recent kernels and everything like updated software as well as the ability to install software through Flatpak (for Telegram, Signal, etc).

My current Debian 10 works with kernel 5.10 (AMD 5950x) and with Nvidia 460.73.05 (Nvidia RTX 3080) from Backports ... Debian is quite capable of handling recent hardware !!

Concerning myself I seek stability, compatibility and security above all. Using software like open office in version 6.x and not 7.x does not pose a problem for me ...

[GdeR]

I really like Debian, but I can never recommend it to anyone. I know it's great for stability, but being stuck with old kernels and old software stacks like GNOME (it's already outdated and Debian 11 hasn't been released yet...) for two or more years makes installing it on new hardware impossible. [...]

Same can be said for other server distributions in general, or are you targetting Debian specifically? RHEL can be as outdated, same for Ubuntu LTS etc.. If you have such new hardware, Debian Stable is just not the right distribution for your system. In that case I'd try somethiing like Ubuntu/Fedora or even Debian from the Testing branch when it's not frozen before release.

[Phil995511]

First Debian I ran was 7 Wheezy, man I feel old, upgrade to Jessie was not smooth so went with Xubuntu 14.04 then 16.04. Now run a mix of the Xubuntu, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

I also really like FreeBSD, unfortunately +/- 80% of FreeBSD based distributions have been abandoned by their maintainers :-(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems

I particularly regret PC-BSD and FuryBSD which were quite easy to install / administer.

Today there is only NomadBSD that I still like, other distributions like GhostBSD have too much trouble with recent hardware which is less than 10 years old...

[DanL]

Hurray! My 2 sid desktops can get up to speed with updates. No more being stuck with Mesa 20 or 5.10.

I use the siduction repos. They keep rolling, even during the freeze.

[Brisse]

Hurray! My 2 sid desktops can get up to speed with updates. No more being stuck with Mesa 20 or 5.10. Though they were super stable throughout the whole release period.

Add these lines to your sources.list:

deb http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free

Preferably swap the 'se' country codes for whatever server is closest to you, and delete 'non-free' if you don't need it.

Now run:

sudo apt update

And to install latest Mesa:

sudo apt -t experimental install libd3dadapter9-mesa libegl-mesa0 libegl1-mesa libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx libglapi-mesa libglu1-mesa libglx-mesa0 mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers

Put it in a bash script for future use if you find those package names difficult to remember. You can also pull in a more recent kernel, or any other package from experimental using the same method if you want.

[Vistaus]

I know you can backport new kernel releases and new software, but I really feel this should be different somehow. Being not able to install Debian 10 on my year-old Renoir laptop because it's still using the old 4.19 kernel seems off.

You could use a Debian derivative like Deepin, which is still based on Debian Stable but has a much newer kernel. And if you don't like Deepin DE, then you can install any other DE afterwards.

[Vistaus]

Add these lines to your sources.list:

deb http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free

Preferably swap the 'se' country codes for whatever server is closest to you, and delete 'non-free' if you don't need it.

Now run:

sudo apt update

And to install latest Mesa:

sudo apt -t experimental install libd3dadapter9-mesa libegl-mesa0 libegl1-mesa libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx libglapi-mesa libglu1-mesa libglx-mesa0 mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers

Put it in a bash script for future use if you find those package names difficult to remember. You can also pull in a more recent kernel, or any other package from experimental using the same method if you want.

That'd be nice, if it would work. If I add the experimental repo to Debian Stable and issue your command, it says it can't update Mesa because it's going to break a lot of packages.

[SkyWarrior]

That'd be nice, if it would work. If I add the experimental repo to Debian Stable and issue your command, it says it can't update Mesa because it's going to break a lot of packages.

This works thru sid only. And maybe for some testing packages but not from stable.

I have 2 desktops running sid regularly one due to some incompatibilities with fedora (mesa gl crashes randomly on desktop) and another due to being my primary gaming machine (my laptop is on fedora - lenovo stuff is much better supported by them). I listened the devil and did the experimental trick on the gaming one just now. I hope it does not turn into a franken debian (At least it feels much better than using a 3rd party repo for mesa. I am not blaming them they are good for ubuntu users but I am not an ubuntu fan). Though I may need to pin some of these packages to be update from experimental trunk regularly.

[mppix]

I really like Debian, but I can never recommend it to anyone. I know it's great for stability, but being stuck with old kernels and old software stacks like GNOME (it's already outdated and Debian 11 hasn't been released yet...) for two or more years makes installing it on new hardware impossible.

I know you can backport new kernel releases and new software, but I really feel this should be different somehow. Being not able to install Debian 10 on my year-old Renoir laptop because it's still using the old 4.19 kernel seems off.

There have already been several suggestions how you can install a new kernel.
The official one is to include the 'buster-backports' repository for Debian 10 and 'bullseye-backports' repository once Debian 11 releases.
Then you can upgrade the newest kernel to the newest officially backported one
'sudo apt install -t buster-backports linux-image'
This repository also contains a lot of other backported software, e.g. libreoffice.
You can also install all backported packages with
'sudo apt upgrade -t buster-backports
However, the latter is not recommended in general - Debian stable is all about stability. I do this on most of my workstations but newer on servers.

I don't recommend trying to upgrade the DE on Debian stable. Switch to Debian testing and you usually get the latest version. Debian testing can compete in stability with Fedora and is fine for general PC/laptop use. I don't recommend for workstation/servers.