Debian 12 Bookworm release

After almost two years of development, Debian GNU/Linux 12.0 (Bookworm) was released, available for nine officially supported architectures: Intel IA-32/x86 (i686), AMD64/x86-64, ARM EABI (armel), ARM64, ARMv7 (armhf), mipsel, mips64el, PowerPC 64 (ppc64el) and IBM System z (s390x). Updates for Debian 12 will be released within 5 years.

Installation images are available for download (publication of images is delayed), which can be downloaded via HTTP, jigdo or BitTorrent. LiveUSB has been developed for the amd64 and i386 architectures, available in variants with GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon and MATE, as well as a multiarchitecture DVD combining packages for the amd64 platform with additional packages for the i386 architecture. Before migrating from Debian 11 "Bullseye", you should read the following document.

There are 64,419 binary packages in the repository, which is 4868 more packages than were offered in Debian 11. Compared to Debian 11, 11089 new binary packages have been added, 6,296 (10%) outdated or abandoned packages have been removed, and 43254 (67%) packages have been updated. The total total size of all the source texts offered in the distribution is 1,341,564,204 lines of code. The total size of all packages is 365 GB. For 96.3% (95.7% in the previous branch) of packages, support for repeatable assemblies is provided, allowing you to confirm that the executable file is assembled from the declared source texts and does not contain extraneous changes, the substitution of which, for example, can be committed by attacking the assembly infrastructure or bookmarks in the compiler.

Key changes in Debian 12.0:

In addition to the free firmware from the main repository, the official installation images also include proprietary firmware previously available through the non-free repository. If there is hardware that requires external firmware, the required proprietary firmware is loaded by default. For users who prefer only free software, the option to disable the use of non-free firmware is provided at the download stage.
A new non-free-firmware repository has been added, to which firmware packages have been transferred from the non-free repository. The installer provides the ability to dynamically request firmware packages from the non-free-firmware repository. The presence of a separate repository with firmware made it possible to provide access to firmware without including a common non-free repository in the installation media.
The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.1 (Debian 11 shipped kernel 5.10). systemd 252, Apt 2.6 and Glibc 2.36 have been updated.
Updated the graphics stack and user environments: GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.2, Xfce 4.18, Mesa 22.3.6, X.Org Server 21.1, Wayland 1.21. In GNOME environments, Pipewire multimedia server and WirePlumber audio session manager are enabled by default.
Updated user applications, for example, LibreOffice 7.4, GnuCash 4.13, Emacs 28.2, GIMP 2.10.34, Inkscape 1.2.2, VLC 3.0.18, Vim 9.0.
Updated server applications, for example, Apache httpd 2.4.57, BIND 9.18, Dovecot 2.3.19, Exim 4.96, lighttpd 1.4.69, Postfix 3.7, MariaDB 10.11, nginx 1.22, PostgreSQL 15, Redis 7.0, SQLite 3.40, Samba 4.17, OpenSSH 9.2p1.
Updated development tools, including GCC 12.2, LLVM/Clang 14 (15.0.6 is also available for installation), OpenJDK 17, Perl 5.36, PHP 8.2, Python 3.11.2, Rust 1.63, Ruby 3.1.
Added support for working with the APFS file system (Apple File System) in read and write mode using the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms packages. The ntfs2btrfs utility is included to convert NTFS partitions to Btrfs.
Added support for the mimalloc memory allocation library, which can act as a transparent replacement for the malloc function. A feature of mimalloc is its compact implementation and very high performance (mimalloc is ahead of jemalloc, tcmalloc, snmalloc, rpmalloc and Hoard in tests).
The ksmbd-tools package has been added and support for the SMB-based file server implementation built into the Linux kernel has been implemented.
A set of new fonts has been added and previously offered fonts have been updated. The fnt font manager (an analogue of apt for fonts) is proposed, which solves the tasks of installing additional fonts and keeping existing fonts up to date. Using fnt, you can install more recent fonts present in the Debian Sid repository, as well as external fonts from the Google Web Fonts collection.
By default, the detection of other installed operating systems via the os-prober package is disabled in the GRUB loader, as this led to problems in some cases, for example, for a guest virtual machine.
Due to the termination of development, the libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap packages have been removed, instead of which it is recommended to use libpam-ldapd and libnss-ldapd packages equivalent in functionality for user authentication via LDAP.
The default installation of a background logging process such as rsyslog has been discontinued. To view logs, instead of parsing log files, it is recommended to call the "journalctl" utility. If necessary, the old behavior can be returned by installing the system-log-daemon package.
Systemd-resolved and systemd-boot are separated from systemd into separate packages. In the systemd package, the systemd-timesyncd time synchronization client has been transferred from mandatory to recommended dependencies, which allows you to create minimal installations without an NTP client.
Support for booting in UEFI Secure Boot mode for ARM64-based systems has been returned.
The fdflush package has been removed, instead of which "blockdev --flushbufs" from util-linux should be used.
The tempfile and rename.ul programs have been removed, instead of which it is recommended to use the mktemp and file-rename utilities in scripts.
The which utility has been deprecated and will not be installed by default in future releases. As a replacement in bash scripts, it is recommended to use the "type" or "type -a" commands to determine the path to executable files.
libnss-gw-name, dmraid and request-tracker4 packages have been deprecated and will be removed in Debian 13.
The assignment of permanent network interface names ("enX0") for Xen virtual network devices is provided.
Added support for new devices based on ARM and RISC-V processors.
Updated system manuals (man) in Russian and Ukrainian.
Collections of thematic packages related to medicine, biology and astronomy have been added, prepared by the Debian Med and Debian Astro teams. For example, packages with shiny-server (a platform for hosting web applications in the R language), openvlbi (correlator for telescopes), astap (astronomical image processor), planetary-system-stacker (generates images of planets from fragments), new drivers and libraries with INDI protocol support related to Astropy Python packages (python3-extinction, python3-sncosmo, python3-specreduce, python3-synphot), Java libraries for working with ECSV and TFCAT formats.
Packages developed by the UBports project with the Lomiri user environment (formerly Unity 8) and the Mir 2 display server, which acts as a Wayland-based composite server, have been added to the repository.
The usrmerge package is included to transfer the distribution from using a separate /usr section to a new view, in which the /bin, /sbin and /lib* directories are designed as symbolic links to the corresponding directories inside /usr. At the same time, package maintainers are still prohibited from explicitly transferring files from subdirectories in the root FS to the corresponding subdirectories in the /usr section (i.e. package components continue to be placed in /bin, /lib* and /sbin, and not immediately in /usr/bin, /usr/lib* and /usr/sbin, and get into /usr using the installed symbolic link).