Debian 11 "Bullseye" Released

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 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 is a good number 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 (https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20210814).

AlmaLinux Makes CentOS SIG Repositories Available

SIGs (Special Interest Groups) are groups within the CentOS community focusing on a specific set of issues. For example, there's the Storage SIG, Virtualization SIG, Infrastructure SIG, Core SIG, Automotive SIG, and the Hyperscale SIG. Each SIG releases its own repositories which contain packages related to a chosen focus.

Once upon a time, users would have to locate a specific repository and then download/install the relevant centos-release-* packages just to enable that particular repository. AlmaLinux decided to simplify that process by releasing upstream CentOS Special Interest Groups' release packages.

Even at this early release stage, you can already enable SIGs for Cloud, Config Management, Messaging, Network Functions Virtualization, Ops Tools, Storage, and Virtualization. To find out how to enable these SIGs, head over to the AlmaLinux CentOS SIGs Repository page.

As to why AlmaLinux went this route, they've said, "By encouraging developers/contributors interested in the various SIG development to work upstream and submit contributions there (and submit bugs), we can ensure this work remains centralized and continues to be part of the long-term stability, success, health, and vitality of the community."

For SIG developers, AlmaLinux has this to say, "Instead of building against CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream 8, SIGs should build against RHEL 8 and CentOS Stream 8! This would ensure that the SIG's output is consumable by the entire RHEL family of distributions, including rebuilds like AlmaLinux."