https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20210814

> After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project
> is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name "bullseye"),
> which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined
> work of the Debian Security team[1] and the Debian Long Term Support
> team[2].
>
> Debian 11 "bullseye" ships with several desktop applications and
> environments. Amongst others it now includes the desktop
> environments:
>
> - Gnome 3.38,
> - KDE Plasma 5.20,
> - LXDE 11,
> - LXQt 0.16,
> - MATE 1.24,
> - Xfce 4.16.
>
> This release contains over 11,294 new packages for a total count of
> 59,551 packages, along with a significant reduction of over 9,519
> packages which were marked as "obsolete" and removed. 42,821 packages
> were updated and 5,434 packages remained unchanged.
>
> "bullseye" becomes our first release to provide a Linux kernel with
> support for the exFAT filesystem and defaults to using it for mount
> exFAT filesystems. Consequently it is no longer required to use the
> filesystem-in-userspace implementation provided via the exfat-fuse
> package. Tools for creating and checking an exFAT filesystem are
> provided in the exfatprogs package.
>
> Most modern printers are able to use driverless printing and scanning
> without the need for vendor specific (often non-free) drivers.
> "bullseye" brings forward a new package, ipp-usb, which uses the
> vendor neutral IPP-over-USB protocol supported by many modern
> printers. This allows a USB device to be treated as a network device.
> The official SANE driverless backend is provided by sane-escl in
> libsane1, which uses the eSCL protocol.
>
> Systemd in "bullseye" activates its persistent journal functionality,
> by default, with an implicit fallback to volatile storage. This
> allows users that are not relying on special features to uninstall
> traditional logging daemons and switch over to using only the systemd
> journal.
>
> The Debian Med team has been taking part in the fight against
> COVID-19 by packaging software for researching the virus on the
> sequence level and for fighting the pandemic with the tools used in
> epidemiology; this work will continue with focus on machine learning
> tools for both fields. The team's work with Quality Assurance and
> Continuous integration is critical to the consistent reproducible
> results required in the sciences. Debian Med Blend has a range of
> performance critical applications which now benefit from SIMD
> Everywhere. To install packages maintained by the Debian Med team,
> install the metapackages named med-*, which are at version 3.6.x.
>
> Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many other languages now have a new
> Fcitx 5 input method, which is the successor of the popular Fcitx4 in
> "buster"; this new version has much better Wayland (default display
> manager) addon support.
>
> Debian 11 "bullseye" includes numerous updated software packages
> (over 72% of all packages in the previous release), such as:
>
> - Apache 2.4.48
> - BIND DNS Server 9.16
> - Calligra 3.2
> - Cryptsetup 2.3
> - Emacs 27.1
> - GIMP 2.10.22
> - GNU Compiler Collection 10.2
> - GnuPG 2.2.20
> - Inkscape 1.0.2
> - LibreOffice 7.0
> - Linux kernel 5.10 series
> - MariaDB 10.5
> - OpenSSH 8.4p1
> - Perl 5.32
> - PHP 7.4
> - PostgreSQL 13
> - Python 3, 3.9.1
> - Rustc 1.48
> - Samba 4.13
> - Vim 8.2
> - more than 59,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from
> more than 30,000 source packages.
>
> With this broad selection of packages and its traditional wide
> architecture support, Debian once again stays true to its goal of
> being "The Universal Operating System". It is suitable for many
> different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from
> development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, and
> storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance
> efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all
> packages in Debian's archive ensure that "bullseye" fulfills the high
> expectations that users have of a stable Debian release.
>
> A total of nine architectures are supported: 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T
> / x86-64 (`amd64`), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (`i386`), 64-bit
> little-endian Motorola/IBM PowerPC (`ppc64el`), 64-bit IBM S/390
> (`s390x`), for ARM, `armel` and `armhf` for older and more recent 32-bit
> hardware, plus arm64 for the 64-bit "AArch64" architecture, and for
> MIPS, `mipsel` (little-endian) architectures for 32-bit hardware and
> `mips64el` architecture for 64-bit little-endian hardware.
>
> # Want to give it a try?
>
> If you simply want to try Debian 11 "bullseye" without installing it,
> you can use one of the available live images[3] which load and run
> the complete operating system in a read-only state via your
> computer's memory.
>
> These live images are provided for the `amd64` and `i386`
> architectures and are available for DVDs, USB sticks, and netboot
> setups. The user can choose among different desktop environments to
> try: GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce. Debian Live
> "bullseye" has a standard live image, so it is also possible to try a
> base Debian system without any of the graphical user interfaces.
>
> Should you enjoy the operating system you have the option of
> installing from the live image onto your computer's hard disk. The
> live image includes the Calamares independent installer as well as
> the standard Debian Installer. More information is available in the
> release notes[4] and the live install images[3] sections of the
> Debian website.
>
> To install Debian 11 "bullseye" directly onto your computer's hard
> disk you can choose from a variety of installation media such as
> Blu-ray Disc, DVD, CD, USB stick, or via a network connection.
> Several desktop environments — Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE Plasma Desktop
> and Applications, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce — may be installed
> through those images. In addition, "multi-architecture" CDs are
> available which support installation from a choice of architectures
> from a single disc. Or you can always create bootable USB
> installation media (see the Installation Guide[5] for more details).
>
> There has been a lot of development on the Debian Installer,
> resulting in improved hardware support and other new features.
>
> In some cases, a successful installation can still have display
> issues when rebooting into the installed system; for those cases
> there are a few workarounds[6] that might help log in anyway. There
> is also an isenkram-based procedure[6] which lets users detect and
> fix missing firmware on their systems, in an automated fashion. Of
> course, one has to weigh the pros and cons of using that tool since
> it's very likely that it will need to install non-free packages.
>
> In addition to this, the non-free installer images[7] that include
> firmware packages have been improved so that they can anticipate the
> need for firmware in the installed system (e.g. firmware for AMD or
> Nvidia graphics cards, or newer generations of Intel audio
> hardware).
>
> For cloud users, Debian offers direct support for many of the
> best-known cloud platforms. Official Debian images are easily
> selected through each image marketplace. Debian also publishes
> pre-built OpenStack images[8] for the `amd64` and `arm64`
> architectures, ready to download and use in local cloud setups.
>
> Debian can now be installed in 76 languages, with most of them
> available in both text-based and graphical user interfaces.
>
> The installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent[9]
> (the recommended method), jigdo[10], or HTTP[11]; see Debian on
> CDs[12] for further information. "bullseye" will soon be available on
> physical DVD, CD-ROM, and Blu-ray Discs from numerous vendors[13]
> too.
>
> # Upgrading Debian
>
> Upgrades to Debian 11 from the previous release, Debian 10 (code name
> "buster") are automatically handled by the APT package management
> tool for most configurations.
>
> For bullseye, the security suite is now named bullseye-security and
> users should adapt their APT source-list files accordingly when
> upgrading. If your APT configuration also involves pinning or
> APT::Default-Release, it is likely to require adjustments too. See
> the Changed security archive layout[14] section of the release notes
> for more details.
>
> If you are upgrading remotely, be aware of the section No new SSH
> connections possible during upgrade[15].
>
> As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place,
> without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read
> the release notes[4] as well as the installation guide[5] for
> possible issues, and for detailed instructions on installing and
> upgrading. The release notes will be further improved and translated
> to additional languages in the weeks after the release.