| Chapter 2. What's new in Debian 12 | ||
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| Chapter 2. What's new in Debian 12 | ||
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Table of Contents
The Wiki has more information about this topic.
The following are the officially supported architectures for Debian 12:
32-bit PC (i386) and 64-bit PC (amd64)
64-bit ARM (arm64)
ARM EABI (armel)
ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf)
little-endian MIPS (mipsel)
64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el)
64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el)
IBM System z (s390x)
You can read more about port status, and port-specific information for your architecture at the Debian port web pages.
The following archive areas, mentioned in the Social Contract and in the Debian Policy, have been around for a long time:
main: the Debian distribution;
contrib: supplemental packages intended to work with the Debian distribution, but which require software outside of the distribution to either build or function;
non-free: supplemental packages intended to work with the Debian distribution that do not comply with the DFSG or have other problems that make their distribution problematic.
Following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware, the 5th point of the Social Contract was extended with the following sentence:
The Debian official media may include firmware that is otherwise not part of the Debian system to enable use of Debian with hardware that requires such firmware.
While it's not mentioned explicitly in either the Social Contract or Debian Policy yet, a new archive area was introduced, making it possible to separate non-free firmware from the other non-free packages:
non-free-firmware
Most non-free firmware packages have been moved from non-free to
non-free-firmware in preparation for the Debian 12 release.
This clean separation makes it possible to build official installation images with
packages from main and from non-free-firmware, without contrib or
non-free. In turn, these installation images make it possible to install
systems with only main and non-free-firmware, without
contrib or non-free.
See Section 4.2.8, “The non-free and non-free-firmware components” for upgrades from bullseye.
This new release of Debian again comes with a lot more software than its predecessor bullseye; the distribution includes over 11089 new packages, for a total of over 64419 packages. Most of the software in the distribution has been updated: over 43254 software packages (this is 67% of all packages in bullseye). Also, a significant number of packages (over 6296, 10% of the packages in bullseye) have for various reasons been removed from the distribution. You will not see any updates for these packages and they will be marked as "obsolete" in package management front-ends; see Section 4.8, “Obsolete packages”.
Debian again ships with several desktop applications and environments. Among others it now includes the desktop environments GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, and Xfce 4.18.
Productivity applications have also been upgraded, including the office suites:
Among many others, this release also includes the following software updates:
Thanks to our translators, more documentation in
man-page format is available in more
languages than ever. For example, many man pages are now
available in Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian,
Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish,
Ukrainian and Vietnamese, and all systemd man pages are now
available in German.
To ensure the man command shows the
documentation in your language (where possible), install the
right manpages-
package and make sure your locale is correctly configured by
using
lang
dpkg-reconfigure locales
.
As in every release new packages have been added in the fields
of medicine and life sciences. The new package shiny-server might be worth a
particular mention, since it simplifies scientific web
applications using R. We also kept up the
effort to provide Continuous Integration support for the
packages maintained by the Debian Med team.
The Debian Med team is always interested in feedback from users, especially in the form of requests for packaging of not-yet-packaged free software, or for backports from new packages or higher versions in testing.
To install packages maintained by the Debian Med team, install
the metapackages named
med-, which are
at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm. Feel free to visit the
Debian Med
tasks pages to see the full range of biological and
medical software available in Debian.
*
Debian bookworm comes with version 4.0 of the Debian Astro Pure Blend, which continues to represent a great one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts and everyone who is interested in astronomy. Almost all packages in Debian Astro were updated to new versions, but there are also several new software packages.
For radio astronomers, the open source correlator openvlbi is now included. The new
packages astap and
planetary-system-stacker are useful for
image stacking and astrometry resolution. A large number of
new drivers and libraries supporting the INDI protocol were
packaged and are now shipped with Debian.
The new Astropy affiliated packages python3-extinction, python3-sncosmo, python3-specreduce, and
python3-synphot are
included, as well as packages created around python3-yt and python3-sunpy. Python support for
the ASDF file format is much extended, while the Java
ecosystem is extended with libraries handling the ECSV and
TFCAT file formats, primarily for use with topcat.
Check the Astro Blend page for a complete list and further information.
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| Chapter 1. Introduction |  | Chapter 3. Installation System |