For years Debian developers have been planning for a merged /usr concept where the /{bin,sbin,lib}/ directories becoming symbolic links to /usr/{bin,sbin,lib}/. With the upcoming Debian 10 Buster is the initial step of their plan after it was postponed from Debian Stretch.

For those that have been wanting to try out the near-final Sway 1.0, this Wayland compositor has made its way into the Debian archive albeit only in the "experimental" section for now.

Debian 9.8 is available this weekend as the latest bug-fix / security fix update to Debian GNU/Linux "Stretch".

The open-source projects that regularly participate in Google's annual Summer of Code initiative for helping student developers start out their career in free software development are already thinking about GSoC 2019. Debian is among the projects working out their Google Summer of Code 2019 plans and have some interesting project possibilities should they find enough interested students.

The fifth alpha of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 10.0 "Buster" release is now available for testing. What makes this new release particularly important to test is that it features the initial UEFI Secure Boot support.

Now included in the Debian 10.0 Buster release and pending as part of the upstream MATE desktop environment is support for making it remote desktop aware.

Debian 9.7 is out today as an emergency release for the project.

Debian 10 "Buster" continues moving along for its hopeful stable release later in 2019. The first freeze is now underway while the new artwork/theme for Debian 10.0 has been decided.

While most major Linux distributions have been supporting UEFI SecureBoot for years already in order to work nicely on modern locked-down (generally Windows pre-loaded) PCs, Debian stable releases have yet to properly support SecureBoot but that should be changing with this year's release of 10.0 Buster.

Debhelper, the package offering various scripts to assist in the creation of Debian packages, has reached version 12 in time for Debian Buster.

For Debian Developers and other contributors that list their personal blog(s) on Planet Debian, there is a new set of rules for DD blogs being aggregated by their site.

Debootstrap, the tool for bootstrapping a basic Debian system and can be done within a subdirectory of an existing system installation, is now a heck of a lot faster.

Debian is currently running a survey for selecting the default artwork of their upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" release.

The latest notes from the Debian anti-harassment team on Wednesday caught my attention when reading, "We were requested to advice on the appropriateness of a certain package in the Debian archive. Our decision resulted in the package pending removal from the archive." Curiosity got the best of me... What package was deemed too inappropriate for the Debian archive?

The Debian installer team has presented their fourth alpha release of the Debian Installer preparing for the 10.0 "Buster" release.

After releasing the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ yesterday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced Raspbian 2018-11-13 as the latest update to their Debian-based Linux distribution for these low-cost ARM SBCs.

Debian packages have supported the concept of vendor-specific patches whereby when DPKG unpacks a source package on different operating systems / distributions (such as Debian vs. Ubuntu), different patches could be selectively applied. Ubuntu is one of the main benefactors of this feature while effective immediately these vendor-specific patches to source packages will be treated as a bug and will be unpermitted following the Debian 10 "Buster" release.

Debian 9.6 is out this weekend as the latest stable update to the Debian GNU/Linux "Stretch" series.

For fans of the Rust programming language, it's now running on 14 different Debian architectures -- including all of the release architectures -- as we move towards the Debian 10.0 "Buster" release next year.

Debian developers have been discussing what to many seems like a rather unorthodox idea of not allowing questions/answers following presentations at their annual DebConf conference. This idea of banning questions and answers follows a policy by a Python conference that forbids questions/answers following presentations and is meant to help ease newcomers.

While Debian has tens of thousands of packages in its archive and users often tend to cite the size of a package archive as one of the useful metrics for evaluating a OS/distribution or package manager's potential, not all packages are maintained the same. In acknowledging that not all packages are maintained to the same standard and some ultimately slip through the cracks, Debian developers are discussing a salvaging process.

At this past week's DebConf18 Debian conference was an update on running Debian GNU/Linux on various mobile / ultra-portable devices.

AutoDeb is a long-standing effort to try to automate the creation of Debian packages as much as possible for trying to determine necessary dependencies of a program, will configure/build the program for Autotools-based projects, and end up generating a Debian binary package. AutoDeb was worked on as part of this year's Google Summer of Code for automatic Debian packaging.

It looks like that by the time Debian 10.0 "Buster" rolls about in roughly one year, the UEFI SecureBoot support should be in good shape.

In addition to Keith Packard talking about the state of the Debian GNU/Linux stack for gaming in 2018, during this week's DebConf 18 was a talk by Debian developer Markus Koschany on the state of games for the Linux distribution.

Making good on their word to release the LMDE 3 beta by the end of July, officially out today is the beta of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 "Cindy".

Happening now in Hsinchu, Taiwan is Debian's DebConf 18. Of the many interesting talks at this multi-day event is X11 veteran Keith Packard talking about gaming on Debian.

Taking place this week was DebCamp while officially starting this weekend is DebConf18, the first DebConf (Debian Conference) to be held in Asia.

Another open-source operating system doing a stable update this morning is Slax, the revived Linux distribution focused on delivering a lightweight desktop that when the project was restarted last year shifted off its Slackware origin and onto a Debian stable base.

Debian GNU/Linux 9.5 is out today as the latest stable update to the "Stretch" series.