Debian 10 – Buster
Debian 10 “Buster” got released ealier this week, culminating work of the past 2 years. It’s a massive upgrade to Debian 9 and a solid release available for 10 architectures (x86/x64/AMD64 and arm64/amrhf plus MIPS, PowerPC and IBM System Z.
I’m away from home for the past 2 weeks but will attempt distro upgrade in my Debian 9 VM, so stay tuned.
Notable Improvements in Debian 10 Buster
Secure Boot is finally here in Debian 10!
This means Debian 10 comes with signed and fully trusted version of GRUB boot loader that is activated by the Shim loader.
Secure Boot is a cool security feature found on most modern PCs and laptops, basically to ensure that trusted (secure) code is loaded by UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) before Operating System.
AppArmor is Activated by Default
This means at least the core OS functionality will run with improved security. You’ll need to disable AppArmor using GRUB options if you want to continue running OS without AppArmor.
nftables is the Default Packet Filter
nftables tool will help with managing both IPv4 and IPv6 packets. I think iptables compatibility is there, meaning you can run iptables commands with common syntax – but implementation will actually be done using nftables.
Linux Kernel Updated to 4.19
Not quite the bleeding edge (I hear Linux Kernel 5.2 released recently), but that’s exactly the point: Debian always prides itself on being one of the most stable and reliable distros, meaning it won’t have latest features but will ensure that everything avaialbe will work as expected.