Debian 9 stretch: features and news

Debian is one of the major GNU / Linux distributions and the new stable version Debian 9 Stretch has already been released. Debian is characterized by a very long development process and with high quality standards to offer an excellent product, not without reason it is considered the most stable operating system in the world, even if this is at the cost of including older versions of the packages than many others. distributions.

Debian 9 Stretch

As always, Debian 9 offers extreme compatibility, being possible to use it on machines with mips64, x86 (i386 and amd64) architecture, ARM 64 bits (arm64), ARM EABI (ARMEL), ARMv7 (armhf), MIPS big-endian and mipsel (little-endian), 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el) and IBM System z (s390x). For some reason Debian is the universal operating system since there is practically no machine where it cannot be installed.

Debian 9 Stretch includes 51, 687 packages among which there are 29, 859 updates and 15, 346 new additions, with this we have one of the best-stocked distributions when it comes to packages. As for the graphical interfaces, the jump has been made to GNOME 3.22, MATE 1.16, XFCE 4.12, Plasma 5.8 and LXQt 0.11. LibreOffice and Calligra are updated to versions 5.2 and 2.9 respectively and it has the Linux 4.9 LTS kernel. We continue with the update of a large number of technologies that include applications, tools, implementations of programming language, servers and much more.

Debian 9 abandons MariaDB to the detriment of MySQL, which comes by default, however, the first one will continue to be available in the unstable repository so that the user who wants to can use it. The APT package manager is one of the foundational pieces of Debian and many improvements have been included compared to the previous version, its security has also been improved and the elimination of the warning for mismatch of hash addition during the synchronization of the mirrors in APT.

Speaking of mirrors, the new deb.debian.org has been included with the contents of the main file, the security file, the ports, and a new debug file under a single hostname and relying on new DNS support included in APT.

We continue with a modern branch of GnuPG through the gnupg package that brings important new features such as an elliptical crypto curve, better default configuration, more modular architecture and better support for smart cards. Packages containing the debug symbols for selected libraries and programs have also been moved to a separate debian-debug file. In order to use it, the corresponding repository must be added:

deb http://debug.mirrors.debian.org/debian-debug/ stretch-debug main

Lastly, we highlight the improvements to the Xorg graphics server that can be run without root privileges, thus reducing the possibility of compromising the system by means of an escalation of privileges, although some requirements must be met, such as having logind and libpam-systemd installed, have support for KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) and the manager are GDM3 sessions.

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