 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at the recently released Debian 12 codenamed Bookworm. Now this release comes to us around one year and 10 months after the previous release of Debian. So Debian, their release schedule, it's not a fixed kind of release date that they work off of. They release about every two years, but they're one of these distributions. They release when it's ready. So sometimes you wait a little longer, sometimes you get them a little faster. This one coming in and a little under two years is not terribly long to wait. So I'm happy that it's out. I'm going to be taking a look at their standard GNOME edition, which it looks like it's going to ship with GNOME 43. I'm going to take a look of course at the flagship edition Debian stable. Now being Debian stable, a lot of the packages even on a brand new release that was just released, it's going to ship with older packages because again, it's designed to be a stable distribution or a long term support distribution. So you're not going to have bleeding edge software. That's not what Debian is about. Taking a look at the release notes here, there really isn't much to see. A lot of it is just package versions, some of the new versions of the desktop environments you can see right now. The Debian repositories have 64,419 packages. That's one of the great things about Debian is that the repositories are so large you can find most of the software you want you can find in the Debian repos. And speaking of repos, they do make a mention that non-free firmware now has its own special repository separate from the standard non-free repository. So here in the past few months Debian, there's been some debates within the Debian team about non-free and free software and how to handle it. One of the things is they wanted to now move all your non-free firmware away from all the, I guess, standard non-free packages. And the reason they want to do this for the firmware is to make it possible to build a variety of official installation images. So I'm going to go ahead and download the ISO and let's go ahead and run through a quick installation and first look of Debian 12. And I've created this virtual machine. I gave this VM six gigs of RAM and two threads of my 24 threads CPU. And the boot screen, you have graphical install, which is what I'm going to choose. You just go through the standard graphical installation. They do have some other install options and advanced options that you can go through where especially going through the advanced options, you can choose what repos you want to turn on. For example, if you didn't want to use standard Debian stable, you could maybe install Debian testing or Debian unstable. I've done some videos in the past of how to install Debian using things like testing and unstable. So check out some of those older videos. They're still relevant today. I'm just going to choose the graphical install option here. When the installer launches, the first thing you're asked is the language. And this is the language used by the installer during the installation process. English is the default. So I'm just going to click continue location. So what kind of English I am in the US. So that is fine for me. American English is the keyboard. And then it's scanning for additional components, loading additional components. Looks like it's doing some IPv6 configuration, so some networking stuff here, DHCP, so more networking stuff. Yeah. So a lot of the standard stuff, you know, it's like most other graphical installers, Debian. You know, Debian, the installation process used to be a lot more difficult these days. Pretty much all the work is done automatically for you. Now let's choose a host name for this computer. I'm going to call this Debian-vert. So if I ever SSH remotely into this virtual machine, I know exactly which virtual machine I'm in. It's the Debian-virt virtual machine. And let me click continue domain name. We really don't need to add a domain name, so I'm just going to click continue. Now next up is setting up our root password. And you definitely want to make sure you read this because by default Debian is one of those distributions that historically did not use sudo. So you actually had a root user that was enabled and you needed to set a root password. But these days a lot of people, myself included, prefer just using sudo. In many cases, sudo has some security advantages over having a root user enabled on your system. So if you leave the root password empty, it will disable the root account. There will not be a root user, which is nice for security reasons. That way nobody can hack the root user, right? Because he doesn't have a password anyway, so I'm just going to leave all of this empty. And when we create our home user right now, let's go ahead. DT will be the name of our home user. Now let's create DT's strong and complicated password. And because we didn't create a root user, DT should have sudo privileges as well. Next up we have time zone. I am in the central time zone, so let me change that. Click continue. Detecting the disk. I'm assuming this would be where we partition the drive. Yeah, so do we want to do the guided partition or basically an automatic partition? Let Devin just partition the disk for you. That's typically what most users are going to want to do. If you want to, though, you can choose to manually partition the drive yourself if you need to do some kind of exotic partition scheme or something. For purposes of this VM, though, I'm going to do the automatic guided partitioning. And it's looking for a disk, a device to write to. There's only one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine, so there's only one to choose from. Next up it says the disk can be partitioned using one of several different schemes. So we have choices here. Do we want everything in one partition? That's typically what a lot of users are going to want. But if you want, you can actually separate your home partition so that it's on its own partition. That's nice if you ever have to reinstall. You don't have to overwrite your home directory with all of your user data. You can also have a separate home, var, and temp partition. So for me, I'm just going to do everything in one partition. So I'll click continue. And there is the partition scheme. If everything looks good, it's going to create a one gigabyte swap for me. That's fine. I'm going to click continue. And then we get one more summary of how it's going to partition the disk. And then yes or no, do you want to write the changes to the disk? So let's choose yes. And it's going to format our drive and start installing the system. Next up, it says configure the package manager, scan your installation media, and find the label looks like the Debian ISO with firmware, binary firmware. I don't need any of this in the virtual machine, so I will skip scanning for any of that. Next up, setting up a network mirror. So we're installing from an ISO, everything we need to get Debian up and running and all the programs are on the ISO itself. But there could be some things that we want that are not on the ISO. So it's a good idea to go ahead and choose yes to use a network mirror. That way, if you're connected to the internet, you can go ahead and pull down those packages using the app package manager. So I'm going to click continue. Now choose your Debian archive mirror country. So I'm in the US, so that's good for me. And then actually choose a specific archive mirror. The default is deb.debian.org. I'm assuming that one would be okay. So I'm just going to click continue. Next up, setting up a HTT proxy. I'm not going to be doing that. So we can just leave this blank and click continue. And it's going to go ahead and configure out for us. Next up, it's asking about some of telemetry information. So Debian is kind of a controversial thing they've been doing for many, many years. There's a package on the system called Popcon popularity contest is the actual name. But basically, it wants to participate in a package usage survey, and that helps the Debian guys, you know, build a better product, right? So I'm going to take part in their user survey. So that'll be fine. And I typically do that on every distribution. As long as they ask and let you know up front, hey, we want to collect crash reports or telemetry information. We want to know what system resources you have on your particular computer that you're installing. Can we get this information? As long as they ask, I'm happy to share that information. Again, it helps them build a better distribution. Next up, choose the software to install. The defaults are, of course, GNOME and standard system utilities. If you wanted to, you could also install some of these other desktop environments. I'm not going to do that. We could also set up a web server. Debian Stable, especially, is really primarily a server operating system. Debian is run on probably tens of millions, hundreds of millions of servers around the world. So you could always use it as a server. I could also use it as a SSH server. But I'm going to leave all of that ticked off. And I'm just going to go with GNOME and our desktop environment. And you can see it's going to install 1,399 packages. This may take a few minutes. And it finished installing all of those packages. That portion of the installation actually took about 10 minutes or so. Next up is installing grub. So do we actually want to install the grub bootloader? You want to choose yes. The only time you want to choose no, if you really know what you're doing and have a good reason. But for most desktop Linux users, yeah, actually have yes checked on. Then click continue. Which device should you install grub to? In my case, again, I only have the one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine. So I only have one option. So I'm going to click continue. And it's going to install grub and configure it automatically. So and then it's doing some post installation stuff. And voila, the installation has completed. It says, please choose continue to reboot. So let me hit continue and reboot the machine. We've come to our grub bootloader. So grub installed correctly. And we come to the GDM login manager. So let me click on my username DT and let me enter the password for the DT user. But before I do that, I do want to move my head out of the way. Let's go to the cog wheel and see they are using GNOME. And I'm assuming it's going to default to GNOME on Waylon because we do have other options for GNOME on Exorg as well. But I'll stick with GNOME. I'm assuming with Waylon as default. So let me go ahead and hit enter. And this is the GNOME 43 desktop environment. We're going to be welcomed with a welcome message here. But before I do anything else, let me actually go into the display settings. And let me go ahead and set up a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution, hit apply, keep changes. And now every time I come back to this virtual machine, it should remember that I want it 1920 by 1080. So very quickly, I'm going to go through this welcome screen here. So our language English US is the default. And I'm going to leave that typing. And so this is our keyboard layout. We have chosen English US. That's the one with the check mark. That's correct. So I'll click next privacy. Do we want to, I guess, share location services, geolocation services? For me, I'm actually going to tick that off for purposes of this virtual machine. I really don't need any of that on. And then connecting to any online accounts, such as our Google accounts, NextCloud, Microsoft accounts. I'm going to skip that. All done. Start using Debian GNU slash Linux. And Debian actually calls itself GNU slash Linux. They've done that since the very beginning. Since Debian first released back in 1993, Debian. One of the oldest Linux distributions. It's actually the second oldest Slackware, I think, released one month earlier than Debian in 1993. So it's a very old Linux distribution. But even in the early days, they were big supporters of the free software movement. They're big supporters of GNU. And they actually, in difference to the free software movement in GNU, call themselves Debian GNU slash Linux. So I'm going to click the button to say start using Debian. And one thing I want to clear up right away. Can I do control alt T to bring up a terminal? No, I'm not sure what the hot key to bring up a terminal is. I'll just search for terminal and I'll hit enter. Oh my goodness, please not white. We forget to change this. You know, Debian ships everything as their defaults. You know, the default GNOME desktop environment suite of applications. But really, you know, I wish they would do something different. More like the default terminal color scheme. Let me zoom in. One thing I want to do is I want to do an echo. I'm going to echo this particular environment variable, xdg underscore session underscore type. What this will do is it's going to let me know, are we currently using Weyland or are we using Xorg? And we are using Weyland, which is what I was expecting to be the default display server, at least when you choose GNOME as your desktop environment. First impressions, the default wallpaper is okay. I've actually, you know, Debian usually does some pretty nifty wallpapers. This one here, I don't know. I think they've put out some better ones in the past. It's not bad though, but I'm going to go into activities. Let's see what is installed out of the box. The first thing we want to do is take a look at what is pinned here in this bottom dock because these that are pinned in the bottom dock will not be in the actual applications menu. So when you pin something, it takes it out of this menu. For example, Firefox is not going to be in here. It's going to be pinned right here. And they're using Firefox ESR. So let me go ahead and launch Firefox and see what version they're on. Again, being Debian stable, you know, some things could be a little older. They're using a very recent version of Firefox 102.12 ESR and let me hit the super key also pinned is the evolution email client, LibreOfficeRider, which is the word processor for LibreOffice. Let's launch that and we get a little tip here, help and about LibreOffice. This is going to be LibreOffice version 7.4.5.1 LibreOffice. Fantastic office suite free and open source software. It's our free and open source software alternative to something like Microsoft Office. Also, we have files, which is just the Nautilus file manager, which not my favorite file manager. But they have been slowly improving it here in recent releases. And then we have the GNOME Software Center, which I definitely want to take a look at because I want to go into the hamburger menu here and go to software repositories because I'm interested. And how easy it would be to change the repositories. Well, we can turn on and off some of the non-free repositories, the non-free repository, the non-free firmware repository. So that is the Debian software tab. If I go to other software, I guess this would be like third party repositories. We could add authentication options, developer options. I was wondering if they had any way to easily in a graphical sort of way switch from the stable repos over to testing or to unstable. And don't see an option for that. And that's probably a good thing because that's something you wouldn't want to make too easy because, honestly, most users don't need to be switching the repositories of their Linux distribution. That's a good way to break things. Back into the menu system and seeing what is installed out of the box. It's going to be mainly the GNOME suite of software. So GNOME Contacts, GNOME Weather, 2048 Game, GNOME Clocks, GNOME Maps, All Riot, which is a collection of card games. There is the Solitaire game and that is click about All Riot 3.22.23. Just a collection of some nice little games. We have the calendar, we have GNOME Videos, GNOME Calculator, which GNOME Calculator is pretty neat little calculator. One of the better calculators we have if we switch from the basic calculator over to the advanced calculator, you get more of your scientific calculator functions, you got a financial calculator. This is really neat programming. Yes, there's a lot you can do with the GNOME Calculator. If you're one of those people that live with a calculator, you're constantly using a calculator. Really, really cool piece of software. And then we have our chess game. And I'm not sure which chess program this is. There's so many chess programs, oddly enough. One of the things with Linux is there are some types of software we just have a lot of. We have a lot of calculators, for example. There's 100 different freedom source calculators available on Linux. Same thing with chess games. There are so many chess games and this one is simply called Chess, which I'm assuming probably means it's part of the GNOME suite of applications because this is the kind of naming that GNOME does. Very simple generic names. Chess 43.1 enforced the version number 43. We're on GNOME 43, so that would make sense that it would be a standard GNOME application. We have a document scanner, system monitor, which we'll look at system monitoring in the terminal. Well, let me go ahead and click the terminal. Of course, this is the GNOME terminal. And let me see if Htop is installed. Htop is not. So let me do a sudo apt update and enter our sudo password. Remember, we have sudo because we did not enter a root password during the installation process, so we don't have a root user. So, and we did get an error here. It says the repository, CDR. So it's looking for a repository for the non-free firmware. Now that is interesting. I'm not sure why it is looking for that, but let me go back to the software center and go to the software repositories. And what I could do is I could turn some of that off. See, under other software, it's looking for a CD-ROM source of this binary firmware. Now let's just tick that off because I really didn't need it anyway. I don't need any of that non-free stuff here for purposes of this virtual machine. Everything in this virtual machine is free software. So all the drivers and everything. So now that I've done that, let me go back to the terminal. Zoom in, let me up arrow sudo apt update. Give it my sudo password. And all packages are up to date. So now things appear to be working. So I'll up arrow one more time, do sudo apt and let's install Htop. Should just take a couple of seconds. Now let's launch Htop. Now, one of the problems with getting on is still, it's a resource hog, right? So it's taking about 1.2 gigs of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this virtual machine. And we're really not doing much. And that's always a problem with GNOME. Oddly enough, for whatever reason, GNOME on Ubuntu seems to be a little lighter. They do some tweaks to GNOME to have it a little bit more performant. They typically are only using like 800 or 900 megs as opposed to like 1.2 gigs here in Debian. No CPU really being used, but of course we're not doing anything that should be taking any CPU. One other thing I wanna do, apt list dash dash installed. What this command will do, it will give me a list of all the programs that are installed via the apt package manager. And if I up arrow and pipe that into wc-l, wc's the word count program dash l, give me a line count instead of a word count. 1,597 packages. That is how many programs were installed via the apt package manager. Let me do a u name dash r. Let's get the kernel version 6.1.0. So that is an LTS. I believe I'm running the LTS here on my arch-based Linux system, which is the host machine here. I'm on 6.1.34. So just a very similar kernel. I believe for the audio server, they are using pipe wire. I can verify that pipe wire is here by doing a where is pipe wire. And if pipe wire is installed, it's going to give me the location of the pipe wire binary and man page and all of that stuff you can see. I get some output there. If pipe wire had not been installed, then that where is pipe wire would have had pipe wire colon and then nothing behind it. So let me close the terminal. Once again, I'm gonna go back into the menu system to see if I missed anything that stands out here. It looks like yeah, it's just all the standard GNOME suite of applications, preferences and settings. There's few more games, five or more, four in a row, Tori. Cheese is the webcam application, part of the GNOME suite of applications. Other than that, let's go to the second screen, more LibreOffice stuff. More games, Nibbles, Quadra, Pezzle, Swell, Foops, Sudoku. There's like 10 or 12 games. Tali here, I'm assuming is a game. Got rhythm box for our audio player, but we also have something called music here. So I wonder why we have two different music applications. So that is music, looks very plain and simple. For me though, I do quite like rhythm box. Rhythm box is one of the more feature rich audio players that we have on Linux. If I go to about rhythm box, this is rhythm box 3.4.6, music management and playback software for GNOME. Although rhythm box is not strictly for GNOME, you can actually use rhythm box on any desktop environment or window manager. One last thing I wanna check out, I'm gonna right click on the desktop and change background. Let's see if we get any other wallpapers that are interesting here. And looks like some standard GNOME wallpaper pack stuff going on. We do have some of the older Debian branded wallpapers. This one from a previous release is one of the better Debian wallpapers I think they ever put out. There is a similar one, similar color, but not quite as much going on. Here is one that's got a blue-green kind of color to it. Very nice. And here is one that I had really liked in the past. That one is nice. Since we're using a dark theme though, we really should go with a light wallpaper. So I'm gonna go back to the default. Yeah, I'm just gonna stick with that for now. So that was just a very quick and cursory installation and first look of Debian 12, codename bookworm. For me, Debian is one of those distributions that I do have a soft spot in my heart for. For one thing, one of the things I really like about Debian is the fact that it is a stable slash long-term support kind of distribution where you install it and things typically just work. Things usually don't break because you're not getting updated packages all the time. It's the anti-arch, right? It's everything that is wrong with arch is right about Debian. Of course, everything that is right about arch is wrong about Debian. So depending on what kind of user you'll choose one or the other for me, I could happily live in Debian if I wanted to. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Maxim, a homies too bald, Matt Mimic Mitchell, Paul Royal, Wes Armoredragon, Bash Potato Chuck, Commander Rangry, George Lee Marshman, Methods Nate, Erion Paul, Peace Archimdor, Polytech Realities for Less Red Profit, Roland Tools, Devler, Williams, and a bit. These guys, they're my highest tier. Patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This first look at Debian 12 bookworm, it wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about free and open source software like Debian GNU slash Linux, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.