The Debian project has announced release of Debian 9 Stretch, latest stable release of independently developed GNU/Linux distribution which is popularly known as Universal Operating System. This release is dedicated to Ian Murdock, a founder of Debian project was passed away on December 2015.
Debian 9 is a result of 26 months of development effort since after release of Debian 8.0 Jessy and this release is planned to support for 5 years. Unlike many other Debian releases, Debian 9 comes with some key changes other than package updates.
The Major strategic changes in Debian 9 can be summarizes as:
The Major strategic changes in Debian 9 can be summarizes as:
For more information on Debian 9 Stretch see original release announcement published in Debian website.
- MySQL is replaced with another variant called MariaDB. This transition will automatically happen if you are migrating from an earlier version of Debian.
- Debian 9 will include Firefox and Thunderbird in official repositories instead of their debranded variants Iceweasel and Icedove. These variants were present in Debian repositories for almost 10 years.
- over 90% of the source packages included in Debian 9 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users from malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.
- X display system can be started without root privilege.
- Debian 9 stretch will replace classical branch of GnuPG with modern branch. This will ensure more security by providing better algorithms for cryptography and encryption.
- Now it is easier to get debug packages. A repository named dbg-sym can be added to provide debug symbols for many packages.
- Improved UEFI support.
- And other software updates.