Debian 12 Bookworm
🎆 Bookworm is released!!
After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project presented its new stable version 12 (code name “bookworm") on 6/10/2023!! This was an exciting release for many reasons; the most non-Debian-like addition being that they allow non-free software to be used during the installation process.
OK, so what; what does that mean? Without getting technical, it means that Debian now ships with the ability to easily get the non-free software that your bleeding edge hardware needs to run; newbies won’t get stuck because they can’t get Wi-Fi up. Users won’t have issues with loading drivers for GPUs they have installed. Firmware will be handled without having to fuss with settings - while it took Debian a long time to get here, they’re here.
You still get the solid Debian experience that users have come to love - Debian is still rock hardened and will just run every day that you boot the system… with all this jazz - we have to check it out!!
🔧 Installationz
You can head over to the Debian Download page to choose which installation media works best for you, but we took the path of using Debian’s standard Live install image .torrent.
Since it’s a Live install image, you can boot right into the system to check it out before installing - if that’s your main focus, you might want to pick something other than standard, as it doesn’t have a window manager installed. Being the tinkerers that we are, we wanted to do it all from the CLI!
After using the .torrent you chose to download a Debian 12 .iso, you’ll be ready to install. We just spun up a Proxmox VM. The .iso we used was debian-live-12.0.0-amd64-standard.iso.
Installation was like any other Debian install - underwhelming, but gets the job done nicely and quickly; as stated earlier, if you normally get stuck because of driver issues, Debian 12 should be an easier install than you’re accustomed to.
🖥 Let’s get a GUI!
We booted into the root account and gave sudo to our user:
usermod -aG sudo techheart
We now have a Debian 12 system that is suitable for server use; no GUI in sight - we want to test the desktop experience, so we first installed GNOME:
apt update
apt install task-gnome-desktop
Rebooting, we can see that Debian 12 offers GNOME 43; just one off from the most current version, which isn’t always the case on Debian… we’ll take it!
Wanting to see what versions of other popular window managers Debian 12 brings over, we jumped in the terminal again and gave KDE Plasma a try. We can use sudo now, because we’re logged in on our user account:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install task-kde-desktop
After gears turned, and apt asked us to change over our display manager to sddm, we rebooted and found ourselves with a nicely co-mingling KDE Plasma 5.27; That’s right, folks - you get the brand spanking newest Plasma money can buy!! Being that Plasma 6 is probably six months away, at best, you’ll be enjoying Debian stability while rocking out with the bleeding edge dudes… for awhile. :P
With our heads full of happiness, lets try an oldie but goodie - we decided to get XFCE rockin:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop
I’ll admit that I’m not familiar if Debian has always used these ‘task-xxx-desktop’ packages but they are really nice, quickly install all needed base software and get you to a new window manager with the quickness! Since we’re playing around we now have three display mangers installed; gdm3, sddm and now lightdm - I left it to gddm, even if it’s not XFCE’s suggested display manager.
XFCE hasn’t had a new release since December of 2022, so Debian is rocking the newest version here, too… if yer choosing XFCE, yer probably not that worried about being the first to cross the finish line, but I’m impressed with the softwarez that Debian 12 is offering up… nicely done!
📺 It’s Debian… what about the codecs?
Debian removed support for codecs in the last release, so it’s important that we add non-free codecs so we can watch different types of media that we’ll surely encounter - while we’re add it, we’ll install VLC because it’s the best video player of all time!
sudo apt install libavcodec-extra vlc
📦 Flatpak support
While Debian 12 has proven to give us pretty good version support for the window managers, there are some applications that run a bit long in the tooth; Firefox ships with 102.12.0esr and LibreOffice 7.4.5.1. (Firefox is two release points below current and LibreOffice is one entire point release below it’s current version!) To remedy any software that we might need to run a more current version, we’ll start by installing Flatpak:
sudo apt install flatpak gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Note: You don’t need gnome-software-plugin-flatpak if you’re not using the GNOME window manager.
Finally, to show how you can upgrade software to their newest [Flatpak] versions we’ll demonstrate how we remove both Firefox & LibreOffice - followed by replacing them with Flatpak versions:
sudo apt remove --purge firefox-esr libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-common libreoffice-core libreoffice-draw libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-gtk3 libreoffice-help-common libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-impress libreoffice-kf5 libreoffice-math libreoffice-plasma libreoffice-qt5 libreoffice-style-breeze libreoffice-style-colibre libreoffice-style-elementary
flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.firefox
flatpak install flathub org.libreoffice.LibreOffice
sudo reboot now
Note: Flatpak warned us that our Flatpak directories weren’t in the XDR_DATA_DIRS path, so we rebooted so the installed applications will appear.
You will now notice that we’re running Firefox 114.0.1 and LibreOffice 7.5.4.2 - bleeding edge!:
💾 And finally, let’s try a few ‘hard to install’ packages?
Librewolf, a popular privacy/security focused custom version of Firefox, takes a little bit of extra work to install, but there’s a package available and we followed the Librewolf documentation to get it installed:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y wget gnupg lsb-release apt-transport-https ca-certificates
distro=$(if echo " una vanessa focal jammy bullseye vera uma" | grep -q " $(lsb_release -sc) "; then echo $(lsb_release -sc); else echo focal; fi)
wget -O- https://deb.librewolf.net/keyring.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/librewolf.gpg
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/librewolf.sources << EOF > /dev/null
Types: deb
URIs: https://deb.librewolf.net
Suites: $distro
Components: main
Architectures: amd64
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/librewolf.gpg
EOF
sudo apt update
sudo apt install librewolf -y
Nice, easy; we’re running Librewolf Firefox 114.0.1-2 - boom!
Wanting to find something that can trip up Debian 12, we gave installing Visual Studio Code a shot. This one will require grabbing a key and adding a Microsoft repository - ewwww!:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https curl
curl -sSL https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main"
sudo apt install code
What popped out was a working install of Visual Studio Code 1.79.0:
Discord can be a toughy to install on some Linux distros… let’s get her up and running:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
wget "https://discord.com/api/download?platform=linux&format=deb" -O discord.deb
sudo apt install ./discord.deb
Simple pimple!
Well - this seems like it’s gonna be a solid release from the Debian team! I’m impressed that it delivers window manager versions that we’re seeing, and using Flatpak we’re able to update packages that Debian doesn’t deliver on… it looks like Debian 12 Bookworm is going to be an awesome base for users for years to come. We also were able to add repositories and get harder to install packages as easily as other distros - this is a breathe of fresh air for Debian!!
Give Debian 12 a shot, I think you’ll be impressed!