Debian is often called the “Mother of distributions,” because it is used by so many Linux variants as a base. Ubuntu is based on Debian, which is in turn used by so many developers to create other distributions, which helps to verify Debian as the mother of so many distributions. Although you might think, given Debian 10 was released in 2019, that Debian 11 would come with a massive amount of new features, don’t get too excited. Although there are a good amount of new features, the bulk of Debian 11 is updates to already-included packages.

In total, there are 11,294 new packages and 42,821 updated packages. Those are some pretty staggering numbers, which clearly indicate the developers have been working hard to bring this new release to life.

One of the biggest additions to Debian is support for exFAT filesystems. With this new addition, users no longer have to employ exfat-fuse. All of this has been rolled into the exfatprogs package.

Another exciting addition is that most modern printers can now use driverless printing and scanning, without the need for third-party software. This is accomplished with ipp-usb, which uses the vendor-neutral IPP-over-USB protocol supported by most newer printers.

Desktop environment updates include GNOME 3.38, KDE Plasma 5.20, LXDE 11, LXQt 0.16, MATE 1.24, and Xfce 4.16.

To find out more about what’s new with Debian 11 “Bullseye,” check out the official release notes.