Seeing more than two years in development, the Debian team has announced the release of Debian 11 "bullseye" as their latest major stable upgrade. One of the most important Linux distributions around, which multiple others are based upon like Ubuntu. With it being a stable release it's going to be supported for at least 5 years.
Featuring major upgrades to various desktop environments here's what you can expect from it:
- Gnome 3.38,
- KDE Plasma 5.20,
- LXDE 11,
- LXQt 0.16,
- MATE 1.24,
- Xfce 4.16.
This is the first major Debian release to bring support for the exFAT filesystem through a newer Linux Kernel, there's a new "ipp-usb" package to support many more modern printers with driverless printing and scanning supported, systemd has its persistent journal feature activated by default, new packaging for software related to help fight COVID-19, better Wayland support for various Asian languages with a new Fcitx 5 input method and masses more. The Debian team noted there's around 11,294 new packages included with this release.
Full release notes available on the Debian website.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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This is the first major Debian release to support the exFAT filesystem
... in the kernel, was far as I understood the release mail. Before they used exfat-fuse.
I guess I'm going to wait for the first point release in a month before upgrading. Yeah, that might be conservative, but I don't wanna break anything and buster with backports is all fine for me. Still looking forward to see what has happened e.g. in KDE the last two years. :D
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Well python 2 disappeared so check the possible side effects (like DisplayCal that is almost out of all the linux distros now, colord-kde can help at least to put back your icc profiles).
But so far so good for me. And more devices are now detected.
But so far so good for me. And more devices are now detected.
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Am I the only one wonder how this adds up to Linux Gaming except of being a Linux distro? o.O
Yes. :o)
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Am I the only one wonder how this adds up to Linux Gaming except of being a Linux distro?Some people here uses Debian for gaming, and also, Debian is the base for the most favor distro Ubuntu, which is the distro where other ones (like PopOS, Mint, etc) are based from.
Besides that, it's useful to discuss here if there's some improvements / regressions about performance with games in general caused by this upgrade (is any).
Personally, the "technical" posts in this site are my favorite ones :)
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If you are a gamer, it is still better to stick with with Ubuntu/Pop_OS or Manjaro due to the udpated kernels and work into MESA that you will miss from Debian being locked down for 2 more years. You can always go with the Testing or SID branch though. If you want that bleeding edge, may as well just do Manjaro.
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Am I the only one wonder how this adds up to Linux Gaming except of being a Linux distro? o.OThere were just articles for Elementary OS and ZorinOS and now you're asking about this?
Liam always does articles on distros. Often DEs as well. I guess they're what you play games on. And also Liam does not restrict himself--he's always said if he wants to do an article about N, he'll do an article about N. And there's nothing we can do to stop him! Bwahahaha!!!
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So I'm a little unclear about all the complexities and drama of the different filesystems. exFAT is the filesystem that was FAT but then it went on a diet, right?
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If you are a gamer, it is still better to stick with with Ubuntu/Pop_OS or Manjaro due to the udpated kernels and work into MESA that you will miss from Debian being locked down for 2 more years. You can always go with the Testing or SID branch though. If you want that bleeding edge, may as well just do Manjaro.
As a gamer I have not really encountered much problems with Debian stable. It is just a preference because I tend to use Debian on my servers.
But yes it is not a bleeding edge platform but every two years it is really nice to only be 8 month late on the Linux scene :P
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If you are a gamer, it is still better to stick with with Ubuntu/Pop_OS or Manjaro due to the udpated kernels and work into MESA that you will miss from Debian being locked down for 2 more years. You can always go with the Testing or SID branch though. If you want that bleeding edge, may as well just do Manjaro.
I'm using it all fine with the backports repository, containing fresh kernels and Nvidia drivers. This might not work for Mesa, though?
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Too bad it's already running an ancient version of KDE Plasma.
I'm using Debian testing with these repos and have Plasma 5.22.4 now:
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma522/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps2104/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Testing/ ./Norbert is packaging Plasma for Debian and provides newest version from this OBS repos. You can follow his updates here.
Last edited by Shmerl on 15 August 2021 at 6:37 pm UTC
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slaapliedje Aug 15, 2021
If you are a gamer, it is still better to stick with with Ubuntu/Pop_OS or Manjaro due to the udpated kernels and work into MESA that you will miss from Debian being locked down for 2 more years. You can always go with the Testing or SID branch though. If you want that bleeding edge, may as well just do Manjaro.When Ubuntu is based on the Debian Sid branch.. :)
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slaapliedje Aug 15, 2021
Wow, that dude has a lot of hate for Gnome 3! How stable is replacing KDE from an outside repo working out? I'm not really a KDE user, when I want to play with it on occasion I tend to install it in Arch though to play with the latest to see if they've fixed the things that bug me about it (and tend to use it for a day or two then go back to gnome).Too bad it's already running an ancient version of KDE Plasma.
I'm using Debian testing with these repos and have Plasma 5.22.4 now:
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma522/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps2104/Debian_Testing/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/Debian_Testing/ ./
Norbert is packaging Plasma for Debian and provides newest version from this OBS repos. You can follow his updates here.
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How stable is replacing KDE from an outside repo working out?
I've been using his repos for KDE for a while on Debian testing and it works very well. He makes sure it's compatible with Debian repos, so newer version in main repo will supersede his if that ever happens.
Last edited by Shmerl on 15 August 2021 at 8:07 pm UTC
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slaapliedje Aug 15, 2021
How stable is replacing KDE from an outside repo working out?
I've been using his repos for KDE for a while on Debian testing and it works very well. He makes sure it's compatible with Debian repos, so newer version in main repo will supersede his if that ever happens.
Ha, well the day that Bullseye releases, I've already had almost 80 packages updated on my desktop (Debian Sid). This one included.
Get:16 http://deb.debian.org/debian sid/main amd64 gnome-user-docs all 40.4-1 [6,568 kB]
So I'm betting within the next week or so, Sid will have both the new KDE and Gnome.
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I like seeing news of big changes to the popular distributions. Keep them coming!
I agree that I would not recommend Debian to a newbie Linux gamer. That doesn't mean more experienced individuals can't make it work for them. Also, Debian is a great server operating system, and some of us like hosting dedicated game servers, too. Not to mention it's really impactful in the Linux ecosystem. I'm starting to wonder why you _wouldn't_ want distro news. Larger PC gaming sites may not talk about Windows or Mac too much because a lot of gamers don't care what their OS is. It's different for us. We game on Linux for a _reason_, not just by default. So, I'll go out on a limb and say Linux gamers care more about their operating system than the typical Windows gamer.
I agree that I would not recommend Debian to a newbie Linux gamer. That doesn't mean more experienced individuals can't make it work for them. Also, Debian is a great server operating system, and some of us like hosting dedicated game servers, too. Not to mention it's really impactful in the Linux ecosystem. I'm starting to wonder why you _wouldn't_ want distro news. Larger PC gaming sites may not talk about Windows or Mac too much because a lot of gamers don't care what their OS is. It's different for us. We game on Linux for a _reason_, not just by default. So, I'll go out on a limb and say Linux gamers care more about their operating system than the typical Windows gamer.
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I tried Deb 11 XFCE on my lappy just last week, as a matter of fact. I was enjoying it until it came time to install a proper Nvidia driver, and I balked. Eek! Back to Mint Uma --- le sigh.
PS Deb kidz: Is there no straightforward, reasonably simple way to manage Nvidia drivers?
PS Deb kidz: Is there no straightforward, reasonably simple way to manage Nvidia drivers?
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PS Deb kidz: Is there no straightforward, reasonably simple way to manage Nvidia drivers?Other than using the distro provided nvidia-driver package? Well... if you want fresher versions, pulling from testing or sid is an option but that does require some fiddling.
Avoid PPA bullcrap and the Nvidia website driver. These can and likely will break your system.
Dumping Nvidia for good is another alternative I personally recommend, but the GPU market being what it is definitely doesn't make that easy.
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slaapliedje Aug 16, 2021
I tried Deb 11 XFCE on my lappy just last week, as a matter of fact. I was enjoying it until it came time to install a proper Nvidia driver, and I balked. Eek! Back to Mint Uma --- le sigh.Add non-free and contrib to your apt sources line, apt update, apt install nvidia-drivers. Really pretty easy.
PS Deb kidz: Is there no straightforward, reasonably simple way to manage Nvidia drivers?
So usually there are a few weird things that catch you when you upgrade a debian box from stable to q new stable... I did my server yesterday and outside of mariadb-server package being removed... hostapd went nuts and wouldn't work. Tons of updates to that package, and weirdly to finally get it to work right qgain... I had to plug in a usb wifi I had laying around, force a scan on it... then the frequency for the PCIe one would finally scan... so annoying.
Of course trying to find one of the newer AX ones that support AP mode at 5ghz is going to be a pain...
Last edited by slaapliedje on 16 August 2021 at 2:33 pm UTC
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