Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

Debian 12 "Bookworm" should arrive in a little over a week from now, with a raft of updated components – and no nasty surprises. Debian 12, code-named Bookworm after one of the more obscure Toy Story characters, is scheduled for release on June 10. The developers have put out Release Candidate 4 of the new version's …

[Anonymous Coward]

All this, and pipewire didn't work ?

Much as I love Linux - and run it personally - I still struggle with it's total inability to do some basic Windows things out of the box.

One is being able to use the button on my bluetooth headset to make calls (needs the handsfree protocol that went MIA a ew years ago).

The other is being able to miracast to a TV.

When I last looked "install pipewire" was supposed to fix the bluetooth issues (it didn't).

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: All this, and pipewire didn't work ?

"total inability to do some basic Windows things out of the box"

To be fair, Windows also struggles in this area.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: All this, and pipewire didn't work ?

Oh yes. A brickbat for Linux is not a bouquet for Windows. Especially as they took 20 years or so to introduce a clipboard history tool.

[Anonymous Coward]

re: Much as I love Linux ..

- quote -

All this, and pipewire didn't work ?

Much as I love Linux - and run it personally - I still struggle with it's total inability to do some basic Windows things out of the box.

One is being able to use the button on my bluetooth headset to make calls (needs the handsfree protocol that went MIA a ew years ago).

The other is being able to miracast to a TV.

When I last looked "install pipewire" was supposed to fix the bluetooth issues (it didn't).

- unquote -

I don't ‘love’ Linux, I have found it more stable and usable on older hardware than the Microsoft product. I run Debian with the lxde desktop.

[RAMChYLD]

Re: re: Much as I love Linux ..

Pipewire-pulse and wireplumber is installed, enabled and started, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pipewire-pulse and wireplumber is installed, enabled and started, right?

Oh yes, I've followed the myriad guides. But still no joy. I can't use a bluetooth headset handsfree under linux. While Jo Schmo next to me on Windows 10 out of the box didn't drop a beat as they connected and yakked.

And digging into the whole saga of HandsFreeProtocol under Linux, you discover it's an(other) abandoned project. Like Miracast.

Miracast is incredibly useful. My last employer had scores of miracast capable screens in various meeting rooms, and staff were used to just "Windows-K" and connecting at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile any Linux desktop users had to carry the correct flavour of HDMI cable (and a damn long one too) if they wanted to participate.

[BOB JOHNSON]

Re: Pipewire-pulse and wireplumber is installed, enabled and started, right?

On Debian 12 to get my bluetooth ear buds to pair and work I had to go to synaptic package manager and manually install libspa-0,2-bluetooth. Rebooted.

Tried two different sets of buds and they both pair and work.

Hope this helps.

[wjl]

Re: Pipewire... didn't work correctly... Re: re: Much as I love Linux ..

I was wondering about this as well, as Liam wrote:

> "Bookworm does, however, default to using the Pipewire audio server – which in our test installation was the single component which didn't work correctly, and left us without working sound."

I installed freshly on a separate partition, and mine worked out of the proverbial box. What I *did* do afterwards, however, was to check if things like pw-jack were installed, since I use my Debian system for recording with Ardour. Works very nicely for me, and with qpwgraph I can do all the cabling just like I did before using Carla, Catia, and so on.

I had tried Pipewire in Arch before, which worked as well. So thumbs up to the Debian team to get this right.

[Ideasource]

Re: re: Much as I love Linux ..

I've seen Miracast implemented embedded devices that operate off of a Linux kernel.

It seems odd to me that no one has sniffed and published these for reimplementation or portability by user.

As long as it's the user implementing then it all falls under personal research.

[Cliffwilliams44]

Re: All this, and pipewire didn't work ?

That's odd, because pipewire works "out of the box" on Fedora.

[Mage]

Re: All this, and pipewire didn't work ?

HDMI cables work, even on an old Android 5 phone. I've never seen miracast or any sort of screencast work reliably, often not at all.

I've had loads of BT gear that never worked properly on Windows or Android. Linux seems no worse.

[Joe W]

A welcome change!

Yeah, the new release, but I am more talking about covering a distribution that is stable, predictable, but ultimately boring. When it comes to server OS, I like boring. When it comes to poduction systems I like boring. Oh, and my personal machine is boring as well, I do not have the will / energy to constantly chase software updates for update's sake, and I am no longer interested in tinkering with the innards of any OS on a regular basis (unless I chose to configure whatever weird thing I thought about, if it is poorly thought out in my part I am willing to suffer those consequences - not when doing something reasonable).

So, yeah, have one of those!

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: A welcome change!

I, too, can't wait to upgrade and find that literally nothinig significant has changed.

Change means work. I hate work.

[Lon24]

Re: A welcome change!

Excitement is for the desktop - not the server room.

A great quality of Debian is this means painless upgrades (well regrades). What surprises me is that Debian based RP-OS (the 64bit version is complete Debian apart from the occasional blob) support doesn't approve of upgrading - but complete re-install. OK if it screws up then you do a re-install from the backup data. But there is more to go wrong in a re-install or more certainly prolong the upgrade procees - like re-implementing all the little apps, fixes & workarounds you didn't completely document.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Re: A welcome change!

-> Excitement is for the desktop - not the server room.

Well mostly. But back in the day when ZFS was introduced on Solaris, it was exciting. And in use it was a 'look how much crap we went through before" moment. Server side stuff can be interesting.

[John H Woods]

Re: A welcome change!

Finally, something we can agree on: ZFS is awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A welcome change!

Excitement is for the desktop - not the server room.

I'm quite OK with a total absence of excitement on my desktop as well, thank you. That's why I don't like Apple announcements like the one happening in 15 minutes from this post (no, not watching, I'll read the summaries later - there's only so many times I can hear someone get "excited" while staying as unemotional as a grave digger before it bores me).

The MacOS UI that I encountered when I started using OSX almost 2 decades ago has remained pretty much unchanged. Yes, some setup functionality now hides in different corners and WAY too many gadgets have been added in an apparent effort to make a big enough mess for ex Windows users to feel at home, but in general it's still the same UI and I hope they keep it that way for a decade more - it's already too late for iOS where the screen has sort of been emacs-ed in that any movement from any direction now may be interpreted as a command.

So, to me, there's no need for excitement on the desktop either. I have work to do, and the whole "hide useful features so people have to hunt for them" with every new release of Windows and Office is IMHO a horrific waste of staff time for which MS should be billed every time they pull that trick.

So there.

[Stuart Castle]

Re: A welcome change!

The problem with Excitement in the server room is it generally occurs if something has gone wrong. If everything is working, unless you are involved in a particularly exciting project (such as upgrading a system), it should ideally be boring, because boring means stuff is working..

[Jason Bloomberg]

Re: A welcome change!

I like boring

Me too but I do seem to keep running into problems of other people coding for what they consider old versions of compilers and tools which are bleeding edge from my being boring perspective.

I have contributed to that problem myself, have upgraded to run something, then developed with that, forgetting others won't actually be able to use it.

[Ozzard]

Please give me a boring distro that Just Works - Debian is ideal

Our entire business runs on Debian. It was that or a DeadRat tracker, and as we go from IoT devices to private cloud it made more sense to go with something that will scale. It's been very stable for our use cases - which, to be fair, don't include user desktops.

[Doctor Syntax]

"the inclusion of non-free firmware on the installation medium as standard,"

I took a quick look at the Devuan equivalent. It claimed the Atheros driver was missing - and then went on to connect to the WiFi anyway. As it happens the previous release does that as well. Actually, I think it's just a data file, possibly listing the channel requirements for various jurisdictions and it's now been realised the error can be displayed and ignored.

What puzzled me is that it refuses to use logical volumes. Unless my memory is playing false - at my age it might - I remember many times working through the Debian installer and assigning logical volumes to /usr, /usr/local, /opt and /var as well as /home with no problem whatsoever. A quick check shows that the previous (i.e. current) version also does that. I think that on the test laptop I was using the version I was trying to install had been an in-place update from the still earlier version. I decided I hadn't time to explore further and it's something I'll have to come back to. It's possible to work round it but it'd be a bit of a faff.

[Ball boy]

About time!

I've put up with snapd's 'entertaining' behaviour for a while but, over the weekend, had a play with Debian 11 to see if I should give Ubuntu a rest until they see sense!

Glad to see non-free will be rolled into the main branch in 12: it was entertaining figuring out how to get it all neatly setup. As per LP's comment, tidying up the installer wouldn't go amiss either - but once it's installed I doubt people will ever need to see it again and so, given finite resources, making the firmware libraries more inclusive is definitely the right call.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: snap is another 4-letter word to avoid.

see title.

[Crypto Monad]

Re: About time!

A big USP of Debian 12 is that it will include a native deb-packaged version of lxd, a container management tool which gives you in effect "lightweight VMs"

lxd is developed by Canonical, and although originally it was distributed as regular .deb, they switched over to snap (which is also Canonical's baby) and dropped the .deb packages entirely, making it incredibly hard to troubleshoot. Debian now gives a way to have snap-free systems with lxd.

Ubuntu still leads the pack for ease of running ZFS on Linux though. You can do it with Debian, but your system will have to re-compile the DKMS modules every time you update your kernel.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: snap (which is also Canonical's baby)

All part of Canonicals cunning plan to have snap dominate all Linux distros. Personally, I find it the biggest abortion since Windows introduced powershell.

Once snap has infected your system it is almost impossible to remove short of a full re-install.

Talk about lockin... now we are locked into snap for all sorts of stuff because of laziness from developers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: snap (which is also Canonical's baby)

Well, they DO actively collaborate with Microsoft (that is 'collaborate' in its WW 2 sense)..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu ZFS?

I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere, but what's the current thinking about Ubuntu's inclusion of ZFS vs licensing of same?

Last I saw (admittedly a while ago) the Ubuntu installer at the time would install a zpool for root if desired, which may have been unique among linuxes, as most (all?) the others settled for how-to recipes for doing ZFS after the fact.

Ubuntu said this way back in 2016: https://ubuntu.com/blog/zfs-licensing-and-linux

... but then, they would say that, wouldn't they? :)

Overall it'd be neat to not have to wonder or worry about GPL vs. CDDL and ZFS "native" support vs. module add-ons and rebuilding after new kernel installs etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: About time!

I would love Debian to take some UI cues from the disk manager in OpenSuSE. From a usability perspectivem the Debian one is, umm, how do I put this politely, idiotic "challenging".

[Steve Davies 3]

re: downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice.

RH based distros (apart from Fedora) are just as boring as Debian.

If you know RH, use RH

If you know Debian, use Debian.

It is not that hard or even contentious these days.

Personally, I know RH and use Alma Linux even on an old 2011 MacBook pro. The only downside is that it needs an external mouse to use gnome properly OOTB. There is probably a work around for that but as everything else works it is a small thing.

Ubuntu used to be super hot but these days most of the people I know who once raved over the latest [redacted] that canonical put out have moved to Mint. Some have gone to Debian. Stability is the thing that IMHO Canonical still faff around with on an almost daily basis if the Slack chats are anything to go by

[Liam Proven]

Re: re: downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice.

[Author here]

> RH based distros (apart from Fedora)

"Aye, there's the rub."

The free ones —that is, Fedora — are very far from boring. In fact they are rather too exciting for me. Things like keeping root and home on BtrFS on a machine that's running on batteries and which I might have to shut down or suspend at any moment is *way* more excitement that I can handle at my age. And then there's the added excitement of flatpak packaging, and no long-term releases, and no proprietary drivers or firmware. Way too much "entertainment" for me.

But the real thing, the enterprise distro, costs money... Or you have to take out some form of subscription to get them for free if you only want a few machines. Or, you can run some kind of unauthorised third-party rebuild, possibly from a rival company… in which case you're running a free distro, but one that wasn't actually built by the people who are distributing it, and who therefore have very little control over its future direction.

If you need it, it's great that such things exist, and they are perfectly viable tools. I am not denigrating them. Personally I think that it is better that these projects on manage out there in the community, rather than as some kind of semi-official ostensibly generous largesse from the vendor itself.

On the other hand, a free community maintained distro is not the same thing as an enterprise distro with paid support. I would tend to feel that the ultra cautious release schedule of a supported enterprise tool, with its years old versions of the kernel and so on, aren't really what you want from a community distro.

I am dictating this, and it tends to lead to a tendency to waffle. I will cut to the chase. I think that there is arguably a happy medium to strike between ultraconservative enterprise server distros and ultramodern bleeding edge desktop distros, and I don't think that free rebuilds of RHEL are that thing.

[Graham Cobb]

Re: re: downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice.

PS - I've been running btrfs on laptops (including one very ole one which often just powers down for the hell of it) for quite a while now. Modern versions (any 6.* kernel) are now very reliable, including handling suspend. resume, hiber and even "oh shit - there goes the power". Although I personally recommend mounting with "commit=15" in fstab.

[Liam Proven]

Re: re: downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice.

How do they handle filling the disk up? That happened to me regularly (due to unpurged snapshots) and it inevitably resulted in a corrupted root partition, which in turn meant a mandatory reinstall from scratch.

[Graham Cobb]

Re: re: downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice.

Well, btrfs is also much better, now, at dealing with filling the disk up (although it is still not a bad idea to keep a USB stick to hand which can be added into a filesystem temporarily to give space for deleting stuff and doing balances if you really get locked up).

Excessive snapshots, though, is not really Btrfs' fault. Many distros come with snapper by default (Debian does not) and snapper does tend to lead people to retain a load of snapshots. Personally I use btrbk instead of snapper, which I feel gives me more control. But I agree it is very easy to take a quick snapshot, then leave it around and find it still there years later, eating up disk space.

[steelpillow]

Really looking forward...

...to the even more solid and less exciting debut of Devuan Daedalus, the SystemD-free build of Bookworm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Really looking forward...

... to the even more solid and less exciting debut of Devuan Daedalus ...

Quite so.

No systemd makes for a great. practically problem free OS.

.

[Gene Cash]

"The chances of this making any discernible difference in performance are minimal"

Actually no... it does keep the system from randomly crashing due to bad microcode.

When I built my current machine, it wouldn't go more than a day and a half without hanging/crashing so I suspected a faulty CPU or motherboard. It's an i7-3770 which should tell you how old my machine is...

I installed the intel-microcode package (which is what this APT change mostly does) and it stopped crashing. (so I guess it actually is a faulty not-working-as-designed CPU, but that's another rant)

And yes, pipewire is crap.

[Liam Proven]

Re: "The chances of this making any discernible difference in performance are minimal"

Good to hear it!

Probably my fondness for running elderly trailing edge budget priced kit had protected me from this.

[Will Godfrey]

Another devuan user here

... and not seeing any problems.

I'm surprised that debian is installing pipewire by default - even the developer says it's not ready.

[Graham Dawson]

Re: Another devuan user here

It shouldn't be too much work for a distro, like debian, to introduce a properly functional default alsa config and some scripts to handle hotplugging. The reluctance of any distro to do this is why we ended up with pulse (a wrapper around alsa that poettering wrote because he couldn't figure out how to mix audio streams), with pipewire then being the answer to the myriad problems pulse subsequently created. I wonder if we'll get another wrapper soon, or if someone will work out how to port OSS back over from the BSDs.

[jnimmo]

Re: Another devuan user here

Taymans is kind of like the opposite of Poettring though. Pipewire is more production-ready than systemd and the other Poettringware will ever be.

[dmesg]

Downright baffled, indeed.

"... downright baffled that anybody would ever use a Red Hat family distribution by choice". Yep.

But then, I also feel that way about systemd.

OTOH, on my desktop I just want to get desktop-y things done. As long as it's reliable, quick & easy to install/update, and isn't a god-fosaken clusterf ... er, Windows, I'm happy. Can I have a mint, please?

Thank you.

[chivo243]

Bookworm

The Bookworm was a villain in the Batman TOS on TV I think he was played by Roddy McDowall

[Liam Proven]

Re: Bookworm

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Bookworm

[train_wreck]

I installed Pipewire on my Arch system a couple months ago and it immediately introduced a lag time of about 1 second if sound hadn’t been previously playing, almost like it needed to “wake up” if it wasn’t getting actively used. I never could figure out how to fix it so i uninstalled it and went back to PulseAudio. May try some time soon to get it working fully.

[FedUpUser]

Excitement is for when I go out on the weekends.

9-5 Mon to Fri, I want boringly predictable and stable. Debian all the wayyyyyyyy!

[chololennon]

Thanks for still supporting 32-bit x86 architecture

My Netbook Asus Eee PC 1000HE (which has Debian 11 + Trinity Desktop) appreciates a new Debian version which still supports 32-bit x86 architecture :-)

[PaulHayes]

The important word here is "reliable". My employer doesn't pay me to piss about with my OS all day to make it work, they pay me to get work done. So I'll be sticking with Bullseye for a month or two until any potential small teething issues are ironed out, then I'll upgrade my desktops in the office and at home to Bookworm. I'll start updating test servers at that point and then production ones later on.

I'm a little bit surprised the powers that be at Debian have included non-free firmware and that Nvidea driver though, historically they've been very much against such things, who remembers Icedove & Iceweasel?

Our office used to be entirely Debian based but all staff except me moved to Windows laptops a couple of years ago. It still amazes me how much time gets wasted on issues with the OS (e.g. yesterday a sales person and a member of the IT support team spent half the working day getting a headset working in Teams that randomly stopped the eventual fix seemed to be to install some updates which seemed to take over an hour even though they should auto-update every night).

[lamp]

Oh dear, don't talk to me about Teams

[Displacement Activity]

Deb vs RHEL vs Ubuntu

recognizes a GenuinIntel

Ha. Very good :)

Some pointless rambling, since I've got important work to do, and it's not coffee time yet...

People use Ubuntu because they've heard of it, and it has good user community support, and it targets new Linux users, and (occasionally) because it develops new, exciting stuff. None of this is really true of Debian - it's generally just viewed as nerdy backwater. As a sidenote, Ubuntu has called itself 'bookworm/sid' for, I think, the last 3 years.

Having said that, the new exciting stuff can be a bit of a letdown. cloud-init is of limited use, and snap should have been strangled at birth. I suspect that Ubuntu is coming round to this point of view - it's easier to completely get rid of snap in 22.04 than in previous releases.

I develop pre-configured server images and Red Hat is actually my preferred choice, but I had to move to Ubuntu when I couldn't ship Centos images. For development, RHEL8 is actually great - they've put in the work and got everything right, and stuff like Cockpit really helps, particularly with VM management. RHEL is worth paying for, but you can get some developer licences (8?) for free. The community support is actually very good, but you have to know where to look. The only real issue I have with RHEL is SELinux, which is just way too complicated (for me).

On Ubuntu I'm constantly messing around with stuff. It's not really developer-friendly, and I can't spell it. They've completely messed up workspace switching, for example, so I'm back to a Windows-level single desktop. I'm constantly messing about to get things just right - it took 2 or 3 hours just to figure out how I could overlap terminal windows and still see where one ends and other starts, for example. On the plus side, I can develop on my laptop without drama.

systemd - yes, I spent 2 or 3 years whining about it before biting the bullet, and it's actually good. And I've been a Unix user since V7, back in the 80s.

[James Anderson]

Re: Deb vs RHEL vs Ubuntu

Agreed with comments about Ubuntu -- they seem to mess about with the Gnome desktop with pointless UI changes. I recently fired up a work laptop that I had not used for a year or so, did what I had to do then had to google to find out where they had hidden the shutdown button. Next time I fire it up and have a copuple of spare hours its being switched to Mint.

[lamp]

Thanks Liam

Once again for another insightful, excellent article. I always enjoy reading your work - more please!

[James Hughes 1]

WHY do they keep using names with the same first letter, that's now three in a row, Bullseye, Bookworm and Buster. Or is it Buster, Bookworm now Bullsyeye?

It is just confusing.

[tvespasian]

If you want REAL monotonous RELIABILITY AND TRUE BLUE GNU/LINUX.....SLACK IT!

Debian screwed up w systemD1Ld0. Devuan is the fix for THAT atrocity, but the coup that ruined Debian stumbles on.... This never mattered to me, because I CHOSE SLACKWARE YEARS AGO, and Slackware is STILL The King of PURE Linux! It works SO WELL, most noobs have never seen or heard about it. I even choose Slack for my Raspberry Pi's, which are being sabotaged in a host of other ways, so I'll likely Slack a Rock Pi within the year.

Slackware isn't "hawrd" to literate 8 yr olds, like my eldest daughter, who Slacks nicely. If you can read instructions and follow them, you too can have a CLEAN distro which will run for hundreds of days sans reboot, if that's what you need it to be. If you want bleeding edge alphaware, it can do that too, if YOU can.

Debian flails in its own muck. I'll get some popcorn, if my stable Slackware home network bores me enough to care. It probably will.

Happy Hacking! and, to the Wise, SLACKING!

[Roesjka]

Debian

I am running Debian testing MATE since 2011, on 2 pc's and 2 laptops, the only issue I had was when they suddenly removed the fglrx drivers (I had 2x HD7870 running in CrossFire) for the Radeon drivers.

For me Debian testing is the somewhat rolling Debian distro. Reliable and stable as a desktop for server use I would just stick with Debian stable and maybe with some backports if needed.

My NAS a QNAP TS-459Pro is running Debian bullseye (stable), QNAP's support ended years ago, in the OpenMediaVault flavour and will upgrade to bookworm when OMV is ready.

It serves my purpose.