Chapter 2. What's new in Debian 11

Debian again ships with several desktop applications and environments. Among others it now includes the desktop environments GNOME 3.38, KDE Plasma 5.20, LXDE 11, LXQt 0.16, MATE 1.24, and Xfce 4.16.

Productivity applications have also been upgraded, including the office suites:

Among many others, this release also includes the following software updates:

Both printing with CUPS and scanning with SANE are increasingly likely to be possible without the need for any driver (often non-free) specific to the model of the hardware, especially in the case of devices marketed in the past five years or so.

A new open command is available as a convenience alias to xdg-open (by default) or run-mailcap, managed by the update-alternatives(1) system. It is intended for interactive use at the command line, to open files with their default application, which can be a graphical program when available.

In bullseye, systemd defaults to using control groups v2 (cgroupv2), which provides a unified resource-control hierarchy. Kernel commandline parameters are available to re-enable the legacy cgroups if necessary; see the notes for OpenStack in Section 5.1.8, “OpenStack and cgroups v1” section.

Systemd in bullseye activates its persistent journal functionality by default, storing its files in /var/log/journal/. See systemd-journald.service(8) for details; note that on Debian the journal is readable for members of adm, in addition to the default systemd-journal group.

This should not interfere with any existing traditional logging daemon such as rsyslog, but users who are not relying on special features of such a daemon may wish to uninstall it and switch over to using only the journal.

Fcitx 5 is an input method for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other languages. It is the successor of the popular Fcitx 4 in buster. The new version supports Wayland and has better addon support. More information including the migration guide can be found on the wiki.

The Debian Med team has been taking part in the fight against COVID-19 by packaging software for researching the virus on the sequence level and for fighting the pandemic with the tools used in epidemiology. The effort will be continued in the next release cycle with focus on machine learning tools that are used in both fields.

Besides the addition of new packages in the field of life sciences and medicine, more and more existing packages have gained Continuous Integration support.

A range of performance critical applications now benefit from SIMD Everywhere. This library allows packages to be available on more hardware platforms supported by Debian (notably on arm64) while maintaining the performance benefit brought by processors supporting vector extensions, such as AVX on amd64, or NEON on arm64.

To install packages maintained by the Debian Med team, install the metapackages named med-*, which are at version 3.6.x for Debian bullseye. Feel free to visit the Debian Med tasks pages to see the full range of biological and medical software available in Debian.

bullseye is the first release providing a Linux kernel which has support for the exFAT filesystem, and defaults to using it for mounting exFAT filesystems. Consequently it's no longer required to use the filesystem-in-userspace implementation provided via the exfat-fuse package. If you would like to continue to use the filesystem-in-userspace implementation, you need to invoke the mount.exfat-fuse helper directly when mounting an exFAT filesystem.

Tools for creating and checking an exFAT filesystem are provided in the exfatprogs package by the authors of the Linux kernel exFAT implementation. The independent implementation of those tools provided via the existing exfat-utils package is still available, but cannot be co-installed with the new implementation. It's recommended to migrate to the exfatprogs package, though you must take care of command options, which are most likely incompatible.

The manual pages for several projects such as systemd, util-linux, OpenSSH, and Mutt in a number of languages, including French, Spanish, and Macedonian, have been substantially improved. To benefit from this, please install manpages-xx (where xx is the code for your preferred natural language).

During the lifetime of the bullseye release, backports of further translation improvements will be provided via the backports archive.

The default init system in Debian is systemd. In bullseye, a number of alternative init systems are supported (such as System-V-style init and OpenRC), and most desktop environments now work well on systems running alternative inits. Details on how to switch init system (and where to get help with issues related to running inits other than systemd) are available on the Debian wiki.

The Bazel build system is available in Debian starting with this release. This is a bootstrap variant that doesn't include local versions of the extended Bazel ecosystem. However, the current package does provide identical functionality to core upstream Bazel, with the advantage of convenient Debian package management for the installation. While building Debian packages is not currently recommended yet, any software that supports Bazel builds should build normally using the bazel-bootstrap package. This includes build-time downloads of required dependencies.

The Debian Bazel Team is working to package an extensible version of Bazel for future Debian releases. This extensible version will allow additional components of the Bazel ecosystem to be included as native Debian packages. More importantly, this version will allow Debian packages to be built using Bazel. Contributions to the team are welcome!