Debian 11 To Further Deprecate IPTables In Favor Of Nftables Plus Promoting Firewalld

Debian 10 "Buster" already is making use of IPTables' Netfilter back-end by default in their path to deprecate IPTables while for Debian 11 the deprecation will continue further.

With Debian 11 "Bullseye" the plan is to drop the "important" priority on the iptables package while promoting nftables to important. That change of priority effectively makes NFTables set to be installed by default for Debian 11 while dropping IPTables from the default package set. IPTables though is still expected to be found within the Debian 11 archive but not installed by default.

Additionally, Firewalld is working its way up as the default firewall wrapper likely for Debian 11.

More details in this blog post by Debian developer Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.