 What is the most important Lennox distribution? Well, that's debatable, right? But I could argue that Debian is the most important, the most influential GNU slash Lennox distribution on the planet. Debian is kind of like the grandfather distribution. Everything bases off of Debian, it seems. That's not entirely true, but so many Lennox distributions base off of Debian. Debian is the second oldest actively maintained Lennox distribution. It started way back in 1993, and it's been going strong ever since. And of course, Debian is kind of known as a server operating system. But honestly, Debian kind of dominates Lennox desktop as well, because probably 90% of desktop Linux users use Debian or a Debian based distribution like Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary, MX. One of the things with Debian's release cycle is that you're typically going to go two to three years before you see a new release of Debian. So it's been a while. It's been a while since we saw a new release. And just a couple of days ago, Debian released Debian 11 codenamed Bullseye. So today, I'm going to take a look at the recently released Debian 11. I'm going to take a look at their flagship edition with the GNOME desktop environment. So I'm going to be installing Debian 11 inside a virtual machine. And when you get to the boot menu, you have five choices here. You have Debian GNU slash Lennox live. That's just booting directly into a live environment. Then you have Debian live with localization support. You have the graphical Debian installer, which most people are probably going to want. Then you have Debian installer, which is an in-curses installer. And then you have Debian installer with speech synthesis. So I'm just going to go ahead and let's go ahead and do the graphical Debian installer instead of going directly into the live environment and playing around. Let's just get this thing installed. So it's a very simple installer. First, you choose your language. English is the default. So that's correct for me. So I'm just going to click continue. I am in the United States. So United States English is correct for me. And then American English is the keyboard type. So I'm just going to click continue. And it's setting all of that up. And after a couple of minutes, we get the configure of the network. And this is where you need to choose the computer host name. By default, Debian is the host name. That's fine. And then we can add a domain name. The domain name is part of the internet address to the host name. So this is being like domain name.com.net.edu, et cetera. Now, this is not going to be a web server. So it senses just me setting this up on a home network, I could just make up any domain name or I can just leave it blank. I'm just going to go ahead and continue. And then we need to set up the root password. So this is the password for the root user. So create a strong and complicated password for the root user and then click continue. And then set up users and password. So we need to create a non root user. I'm going to call my user dt. That's his full name and his username is also going to be dt. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the dt user. And then verify that password and click continue. And setting up the clock. And it's asking about time zone. I am in the central time zone here in the US. I'm just going to choose that and click continue. And then we come to the partitioning of the disk. I am going to use the entire disk. I'm going to give the entire 25 gigs of this virtual machines virtual hard drive. I'm going to give the whole thing to Debian. Now if you wanted to you could choose manual and set up partitioning yourself. But for me I'm just going to go ahead and do the guided use entire disk. And then there's only one device inside the virtual machine one virtual hard drive. So that's the only one that can be chosen for me. And then do I want to set up a separate home partition or separate home var and temp partition on actual installation I might do this and this virtual machine I will decline that option I just want everything in one partition. And this is the partition scheme. It's going to create a 25 gig extend for partition. It's also going to create a one gig swap partition for me in this VM. That's fine. I'm going to click continue. And then once again we review the partition scheme. I'm going to click yes, meaning right the changes to the disk. So it's going to format the drive and right to the disk. This part of the installation typically takes five or 10 minutes. I'll pause the video and I'll be back once the installation has completed. And now we get to configure the package manager. It's asking about setting up a network mirror. What this is a network mirror will be used to supplement the software that's included on the installation media. So it basically allows you to connect to the internet and get fresh packages if there's newer versions of some of the software available. So by default, it's ticked on as yes, I'm going to leave that as yes. And then we need to go ahead and get our country. It's United States and this is important because it's going to connect to Debian mirrors so it can grab some software and you want mirrors close to you. So make sure that you choose your country from the list. And then you can select a specific mirror in your country from this list by default. Mine is set to deb.debian.org. I'm just going to leave it as the default mirror. And then HTTP proxy. I'm not using a proxy. So I can just skip that. I'm going to click continue. And now it's configuring the app to package manager. And now it's installing the grub bootloader. So we're pretty close to the end of the installation. Once it installs the bootloader, we should be able to reboot the machine. Next it asks us, where do we want to install the grub bootloader? Do you want it on your primary drive? That's typically where you want it. So it's ticked on as yes, that's what I'm going to do. And then we need to specify the device for me. It's slash dev slash VDA because it's a virtual disk for you. It's probably going to be something like slash dev slash SDA. Anyway, pick the device you want to install grub to and then click continue. And the installation has completed. It's asking us, do we want to go ahead and reboot? And I'm going to click continue and it should automatically reboot for us. And it reboots and we get a grub menu. Let me go ahead and boot into our freshly installed Debian 11 bullseye. All right, and we get our login manager. So let me go ahead and log in. Let me go ahead and get the screen resolution set. So I'm going to hit the super key and I'm going to type display. And let's open up the display settings and see if I have a better screen resolution as an option 19 20 by 1080 would work for us. And I'm going to keep those changes. All right, and then close that program. And we still got some set up to do so when you first log in after the reboot is still going to ask you a few more things such as are you going to use English United States as the language. And then of course it's going to ask about the keyboard layout again English us it remembers what I chose I think or maybe that's just the default settings privacy is asking do we want to allow applications to determine your geographical location do you want geolocation turned on or off typically I'd probably turn that off just for privacy reasons if you want to leave it ticked on that's okay to click next connect online accounts so you can connect to your Google accounts next cloud Microsoft Facebook. I don't have any of these really that I want to connect to I do have a next cloud account but I'm not going to connect that here inside this VM so I just skip that and then all done start using Debian GNU slash Linux and then once again we get a start page here or a hello program that gives us some basic information I guess about GNOME in this case this is GNOME help and it's going to tell us a little bit about the particulars of this desktop environment I know enough about GNOME to get around so I will close that by the way it should be said that this is not GNOME 40 which is the latest version of GNOME this is GNOME 3, GNOME 3.38 to be specific so still a older version of GNOME that's one of the things about Debian especially Debian stable is typically things are going to be a little older you're not going to have the latest version of GNOME if you install the plasma edition you're not going to have the latest version of KDE Plasma I think they're still shipping KDE Plasma 5.20, Mate is Mate 1.24 XFCE is 4.16 that's still the latest XFCE though because XFCE hardly ever releases a new version initially upon login I will say I do like the new wallpaper this Debian branded wallpaper I love the logo and little abstract art background that's really nice if I just click around here and let's get into the menu system show applications here let's see what is installed by default on Debian the GNOME edition we have the 2048 game we have Solitaire another game we have a dictionary we have GNOME calendar cheese which is a webcam program chess which chess program is that is that GNU chess or is that a another chess game chess 3.38 so it's the same version number as GNOME so I'm assuming that's GNOME's own chess application I actually did not know they had one that's kind of cool let me get back into the application menu here and then we have GNOME clocks GNOME contacts Debian reference of course that's for your your help information documents evolution evolution is the email clients one of the standard GNOME applications I won't be setting up an email here inside this virtual machine but I will close that but evolution is a fine program getting back into the applications menu you'll also find extensions I'm assuming that's just turning on and off some of the GNOME extensions so if you wanted an applications menu you could tick that on and now very cool and yeah I think I like that actually I'm going to turn that back off for now but you have several other things you could turn on let me go ahead and close out of that getting back into the applications you have files and that's just GNOME files that's actually the Nautilus file manager and of course this is going to be 3.38.2-stable Nautilus is not my favorite file manager by a long shot GNOME one of the things when they moved to GNOME 3 they really started stripping out a lot of features of the desktop trying to make it as minimal and as simple to use as possible they also kind of stripped out a lot of the features of the Nautilus file manager to the point honestly I would definitely strongly urge you guys if you're a GNOME user probably install a better file manager that's got you know more features that you expect something like I don't know Nemo, Thunar, PCman, fm. Our default browser is Firefox ESR so that's the extended support release of Firefox let's go ahead and launch that and see what version we are running here if I go to help and about Firefox this is Firefox ESR 78.12. Let me go ahead and close out of Firefox it's going to complain about closing multiple tabs I'm going to go ahead and close it anyway continuing on through the applications that are installed we got a few more games five or more four in a row etc. Hattori a lot of games actually we also have some LibreOffice programs installed we have LibreOffice Calc Draw, Impress and Writer let's see what version of LibreOffice we're on because this is Debbie and Stable many of these programs may not be on the absolute latest version we may be a version or two behind so that's legal information about LibreOffice I wanted the about information LibreOffice 7.0.4.2 is the version we're on and back in the applications menu again we also have more games mahjong good on maps more games minds a lot of games a ton of games that's really strange I want that there must be a dozen games here that's this very maybe more than a dozen now because Sudoku, Swelfoop, Tali that looks like that's a game Tetravex probably close to 20 games well that's really incredible we have our software center this is good GNOME software and let's go shopping and if I wanted to search for something I don't know let me search for Htop I don't know if Htop is installed by default on Debian it doesn't look like it because I have the install button here so let's install it let me give it my root password all right and we installed it and it's asking to launch it will it actually launch it it will it'll launch a terminal and Htop running inside the terminal let's go ahead and take a look at that actually let me close the software center before I take a look at it and we are using not quite a bit of CPU at the moment but some of that may be because I had opened the software center and we were syncing some repositories I don't know but one of the cores I gave this machine two cores is pegged all the way at a hundred percent that does not seem normal we're using 845 megs of RAM I gave this machine six gigs of RAM to play with 845 megs of RAM is pretty respectable for going on because going on sometimes takes up more than a gig of RAM on a cold boot so let me go ahead and open a terminal let me run Htop one more time see if the CPU settled back down no we're still using a hundred percent of one of the cores that I gave this machine I finally dropped back down so something was really pegging the CPU for a second that typically when it's pegged like that more than likely it was trying to run some kind of repository sync since I had just opened the software center it was probably just just trying to sync the repositories and let us know if there were any updates available but that settled back down nicely although I hate the blinding white text let me right click go to preferences see if we can change the colors use colors from system theme if that's the system to theme that's a horrible theme how about going on dark let's see if that works better there that's obviously a lot better so let's do a u-name dash or let's get the kernel we are on kernel five dot ten and this is of course the kernel you're gonna be on forever you're gonna be on the five dot ten series by the way we should talk about support Debian stable is supported for up to five years and this is a LTS kernel I believe the five dot ten series and the LTS kernels you're gonna get somewhere around two to six years of support on the five ten series kernels let's see actually how many packages are actually installed here out of the gate so I'm gonna do a apt list space dash dash installed and let me rerun that and pipe that through the word count program so pipe that into wc space dash L for line count two thousand four hundred and thirty packages are installed out of the box in Debian actually two thousand four hundred and twenty nine I installed H top myself so I want to clarify that I don't want to make it seem like it's more bloated than it is now one of the biggest benefits of running Debian as your Linux distribution is the huge repository of software that Debian has with this version Debian claims now to have more than fifty nine thousand pieces of software in the repositories and that includes eleven thousand new pieces of software they've added since Debian 10 so it's a huge repository of software matter of fact I probably should switch over to the root user and let's do a apt update and and apt upgrade just to see if there are any updates available it looks like they were seventy five updates available so even though this is Debian stable and it was just released a couple of days ago there's still a few things that they've pushed since the release well it's a good idea for me to go ahead and take this update just in case it fixes any kind of problems because I might actually keep this VM around for a little while I typically keep a VM of Debian around I like keeping VMs of Debian Arch Ubuntu some of the more mainstream distributions just to play around with and sometimes to do things on video with if I get back into the applications I don't think I went through the entire application list or did I yeah mostly games we had the tie X terminal why is that there and what the heck is that I have no idea what it is that's the first time I've ever seen tie X terminal yeah I don't know you are X term is here X term is here of course the GNOME terminal is the default terminal and transmission is our bit torrent client fantastic bit torrent client this is typically how I actually download all of my ISOs when I am doing these distribution reviews for example Debian how did I get the ISO I went and grabbed the URL for the torrent and I just go to file open URL and I pasted the the URL for Debian's torrent and it started downloading the ISO for Debian 11 so that's typically how I get my ISOs that's how I recommend you guys download your ISOs as well because it helps on bandwidth and things you don't want to use HTTP downloads especially for smaller distributions you'll melt down their servers on release day because so many people will be hitting those servers so it's best to use torrents if you can one interesting thing about this release of Debian is Debian now has support for the XFAT file system and that's really cool XFAT of course is a Microsoft file system Microsoft now that they're more I guess friendly regarding open source a couple years ago Microsoft joined some open source initiative I forget what it was it was the open source security foundation I could be wrong about that name but it's a group of companies that come together and every member of that coalition agrees that we're not going to sue each other over patents so Microsoft being a part of that I guess you know some of their patents were not scared of them anymore as far as the Linux world so now we can actually use things like Microsoft's XFAT file system and getting back into the the desktop here let me right click and go to change background let's see what kind of wallpapers are available here obviously we had the cool Debian branded wallpaper are there any others it's like there's some older wallpapers I've seen that one before this one here is very nice I've seen this before let me make this window smaller really cool Debian wallpapers yeah most of this I've seen before it doesn't look like there's really anything new or exciting here yeah that's kind of colorful I kind of like that if you want a real splash of color on the screen for me I typically go for things a little more minimal how about this one here ah that's kind of cool I think I'm going to go with that for now let me hit the super key and go to settings let's open up the settings manager here of course I was already in it I was in the background portions of the settings manager but what I really wanted to do is play with the appearance settings I guess that's not where I go for that let me type appearance customize look and feel there we go and I guess I have to install something to customize the look and feel okay well how do I change I don't know icons okay I know there was a tweak tool installed maybe that's it let me see what the tweak tool does okay it has an appearance tab okay and that's where you can change the theme and the icon set and things like that the icon set is that horrible and way to icon set but that's the only one that's really installed by default you have high color and high contrast which are not very good those are for people that need that the high contrast icons if you have some visual impairments anyway I guess I'll close that out that's just one thing that's a minor gripe I have never liked this icon set I don't know why they keep shipping this horrible add way to icon set I also am not crazy about the GTK theme this slightly brown grayish brown it's it's very weird the color choices there now to be fair to Debian they're not the ones that created that horrible GTK theme and icon set you know that came from the GNOME folks directly so you know Debian just doesn't bother changing it right there shipping a very vanilla GNOME here so that's just a very quick cursory look at the recently released Debian 11 codenamed bullseye with the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment which is kind of weird that already this thing was just released a couple of days ago and already the desktop environment that it shipped with is really really old because nobody's really shipping GNOME 3.38 anymore everybody is on GNOME 40 by now but that's Debian right it's Debian stable that's right they call it stable this old packages nothing is likely to break and that's the great thing about Debian as Debian is very popular of course in the server world and also in the enterprise world you can put this on a machine and run it for five years and you should be reliable right nothing unexpected should happen that's one of the things I really like about Debian I've used Debian on my machines in the past before doing the YouTube channel I use Debian all the time because I was kind of one of those people where I just typically just wanted to install something and I didn't want to worry about it now because I'm often needing new software to do various things usually channel related things you know I can't run a old and crusty distribution like Debian anymore I need something with fresher packages but I do have a soft spot in my heart for Debian now before I go I need to think a few special people I need to think the producers of this episode I need to think Apsi gave James Mitchell Paul West Akami Allen Chukur David Dylan Gregory Heiko Mike Erion Alexander Peace Arch and Fedora and Debian Polytech Raver profit Scott Steven and Willie these guys they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon with that these guys this quick look at the recently released Debian 11 it wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors it's just me and you guys the community if you like my work and want to consider supporting me take a look at DistroTube over on Patreon all right guys Peace that icon set made me very sad