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Title: Debian 8.0 'Jessie' is out and even Microsoft is celebrating
Source:
PC World
URL Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2914 ... -microsoft-is-celebrating.html
Published: Apr 25, 2015
Author: Chris Hoffman
Post Date: 2015-04-25 11:35:20 by Willie Green
Keywords: None
Views: 1670
Comments: 6
The wait is over. Debian 8.0—“Jessie”—will be released on April 25, after a nearly two-year development cycle for the next release of this long-standing Linux distribution. Microsoft is even throwing Debian a birthday party, complete with cake. Sure, it’s basically just an advertisement for Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform, but it’s still amusing. As usual—with every Linux distribution, really—the biggest changes you’ll notice are package updates. The majority of the packages included with Debian have had their versions bumped to the latest ones. From desktop environments and desktop applications to server software, system tools, and libraries, Debian now includes more of the latest software. Debian 7.0 Wheezy was released back in 2013, so there are about two years of new software included along with Debian here. New versions of Debian and Linux distributions don’t just bump package versions—all these bits of software from different projects are tested to make sure they work properly together and form a stable system. The old and insecure SSLv3 protocol has been disabled across this release, with system cryptography libraries and applications compiled without support for it. Many packages are now compiled with more “hardened” compiler flags for security purposes—these provide additional protection against buffer overflows and other attacks. Debian 8.0 Jessie switches back to GNOME as the default desktop environment. In Debian 7.0 Wheezy, Xfce was the default. GNOME fought back and has improved immensely since then. Specifically, Jessie includes GNOME 3.14. But it’s not all bad news if you loathe GNOME Shell. Along with the usual universe of Linux desktop environments, the MATE and Cinnamon desktops popularized by Linux Mint are also available in Debian Jessie. This is the release that sees Debian switch to systemd from the old SysV init system. It was previously included with Debian 7 Wheezy as a technology preview, but it’s now the default for everyone in Debian 8. The Debian project had to switch to something, and systemd won out. Ideally, you shouldn’t notice any differences. Even if you’ve written your own SysV init scripts, systemd is designed to be a drop-in replacement that supports all your old scripts. This decision was made after much drama and debate, and the Devuan project is upset about it and working on forking Debian sans systemd. But it remains to be seen if Devuan has enough staying power to bring together a large number of people to spend years on creating a forked version of Debian. It’s a huge job. Debian is just the latest Linux distribution to switch to systemd. Ubuntu just switched to systemd with Ubuntu 15.04, for example. Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, openSUSE, Arch, and various other distributions have also adopted it in the past. Modern computers that use EFI boot mode instead of BIOS boot mode have been a bit of a pain point, but Debian 8.0 Jessie has seen a lot of improvements here. Computers with broken EFI implementations should now be handled much more gracefully. Debian Jessie should even boot and install on Intel-based Macs without any additional third-party software. This hopefully isn’t something you’ll even need to think about. Debian should “just work” on more computers, just as the latest version of the Linux kernel should make more hardware “just work.” Across the nearly two years of updated packages with various improvements and bug fixes, there are many more changes—far too many to list. Check Debian Jessie’s official release notes for more detailed information.
Poster Comment: NOTE: Although Debian 8.0 is scheduled for release today, the Debian website itself has not been updated yet, and is still offering 7.8 for download.
Software, security, and desktop updates
Systemd is now the default in Debian, too
Debian should just work on more PCs
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#1. To: Willie Green (#0)
(Edited)
Systemd and EFI support are the big news for all the Linux flavors. A long overdue upgrade.
Can they lose the goofy names and make it useable by normal people?
The use of OS version codenames seems to be ubiquitous throughout the software industry. Although the general public may be unaware of them, even Microsoft uses them for internal project management purposes. However, I assume that since linux distributions are "open source," the version codenames that are used are more transparent to the end users. The codenames used by Debian are characters who appeared in the "Toy Story" movies. Many millions of "normal people" are already using linux and don't even know it. If they have a smartphone, tablet or netbook computer running Google's Android or Chrome OS, those are simply Google's customization of linux for those products.
No, and no. They've had years and many promises - the answer is no. Linux is fine for servers, backbone infrastructure, embedded special-purpose systems, settop boxes, cheap computers used for browsing, email and spreadsheets, but still pretty useless for advanced everyday users. Just try performing technical analysis and managing trading portfolios with it, for example.
I gave it an honest try. It wasn't as good as Windows, all things considered.
I think Debian 8 was a strong offering for the Debian types but Ubuntu just continues to expand its influence in mindshare, defining what a modern Linux distro should look like. I've run Mint Linux 17.2 (with Cinnamon 2.6) as a VM since July 15. It is a smooth clean implementation. I just did the full upgrade for all components to make it current and it downloaded about 230MB in updates in about five minutes. It took much longer to grind through the installation of all the packages but it is only a bit slow, not unreasonably so compared with Windows or OSX update times. After maybe 20 minutes, I've got the Your system is up-to-date checkmark. The Rafaella version is pretty complete with LibreOffice and other Linux standard apps pre-installed.
Systemd is now the default in Debian, too
#2. To: Willie Green (#0)
#3. To: Biff Tannen (#2)
Can they lose the goofy names and make it useable by normal people?
#4. To: Biff Tannen (#2)
(Edited)
Can they lose the goofy names and make it useable by normal people?
#5. To: Hank Rearden (#4)
#6. To: Willie Green (#0)
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