Version history Debian distribution codenames are based on the
names of characters from the
Toy Story films. Debian's
unstable trunk is named after
Sid, a character who regularly destroyed his toys.
Founding (1993–1998) First announced on August 16, 1993, Debian was founded by
Ian Murdock, who initially named the system "the Debian Linux Release". The word "Debian" was formed as a
portmanteau of the first names of himself and his then-girlfriend (later ex-wife) Debra Lynn. Before Debian's release, the
Softlanding Linux System (SLS) had been a popular Linux distribution and the basis for
Slackware. Murdock was motivated to launch a new distribution by what he saw as poor maintenance and the prevalence of
bugs in SLS. Debian 0.01, released on September 15, 1993, was the first of several internal releases. Version 0.90 was the first public release, The release included the Debian Linux
Manifesto, outlining Murdock's view for the new
operating system. In it he called for creating a distribution to be maintained "openly in the spirit of Linux and GNU." The Debian project released the 0.9x versions in 1994 and 1995. During this time it was sponsored by the
Free Software Foundation for one year. Ian Murdock delegated the base system, the core packages of Debian, to Bruce Perens, while Murdock focused on managing the growing project. By that time and thanks to
Ian Jackson, the dpkg
package manager was already an essential part of Debian. In 1996,
Bruce Perens assumed project leadership. He was a controversial leader, regarded as authoritarian and strongly attached to Debian. He drafted a
social contract and edited suggestions from a month-long discussion into the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. After the FSF withdrew their sponsorship in the midst of the
free software vs. open source debate, Perens initiated the creation of the legal
umbrella organization Software in the Public Interest instead of seeking renewed involvement with the FSF. By the time Debian 1.2 was released, the project had grown to nearly two hundred volunteers. Ian Jackson became the project leader in 1998. Debian 2.0 introduced the second official port, to the
m68k architecture. On December 2, the first Debian Constitution was ratified. The package manager front-end Advanced Packaging Tool (
APT) was deployed with Debian 2.1.
Corel Linux and
Stormix's Storm Linux, were started in 1999. In late 2000, the project reorganized the archive with new package "pools" and created the
Testing trunk, made up of packages considered stable, to reduce the freeze for the next release. In May 2001,
Hewlett-Packard announced plans to base its Linux development on Debian. In July 2002, the project released version 3.0, code-named Woody, the first release to include
cryptography software, a free-licensed KDE and
internationalization. During these last release cycles, the Debian project drew considerable criticism from the free software community because of the long time between stable releases. Some events disturbed the project while the Sarge release was in preparation, as Debian servers were attacked by fire and hackers. One of the most memorable was the Vancouver prospectus. After a meeting held in
Vancouver, release manager Steve Langasek announced a plan to reduce the number of supported ports to four in order to shorten future release cycles. There was a large reaction because the proposal looked more like a decision and because such a drop would damage Debian's aim to be "the universal operating system". The first version of the Debian-based
Ubuntu distribution, named "4.10 Warty Warthog", was released on October 20, 2004. Because it was distributed as a free download, it became one of the most popular and successful operating systems with more than "40 million users" according to
Canonical Ltd. However, Murdock was critical of the differences between Ubuntu packages and Debian, stating that it led to incompatibilities.
Sarge and later releases (2005–present) The 3.1
Sarge release was made in June 2005. This release updated 73% of the software and included over 9,000 new packages. A new installer with a modular design,
Debian-Installer, allowed installations with redundant array of inexpensive disks (
RAID), X
file system XFS, and
Logical Volume Manager (LVM) support, improved hardware detection, made installations easier for novice users, and was translated into almost forty languages. An installation manual and release notes were in ten and fifteen languages respectively. The efforts of Skolelinux,
Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility raised the number of packages that were educational or had a medical affiliation, and of packages made for people with disabilities. logo In 2006, as a result of a much-publicized dispute,
Mozilla software was rebranded in Debian. The Mozilla Corporation stated that software with unapproved modifications could not be distributed under the Firefox trademark. Two reasons that Debian had modified the Firefox software were to replace non-free artwork and to provide security
patches. Consequently, Debian contained a fork of
Firefox named Iceweasel and one of
Thunderbird named Icedove. In February 2016, it was announced that Mozilla and Debian had reached an agreement and Iceweasel would revert to the name Firefox; a similar agreement was anticipated for Icedove/Thunderbird. A fundraising experiment, Dunc-Tank, was created to solve the release cycle problem and release managers were paid to work full-time; in response, unpaid developers slowed down their work and the release was delayed. Debian 4.0 (
Etch) was released in April 2007, featuring the
x86-64 port and a graphical installer. The release was dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a developer who died in a car crash. In July 2009, the policy of time-based development freezes on a two-year cycle was announced. Time-based freezes are intended to blend the predictability of time based releases with Debian's policy of feature-based releases, and to reduce overall freeze time. In September 2010, the
backporting service became official, providing more recent versions of some software for the stable release. Debian 8 (Jessie) was released in April 2015, using
systemd as the new init system. Debian 9 (Stretch) was released in June 2017, with nftables as a replacement for iptables, support for Flatpak apps, and MariaDB as the replacement for MySQL. Debian was formerly released as a very large set of CDs for each architecture, but with the release of Debian 9 (Stretch) in 2017, many of the images have been dropped from the archive but remain buildable via
jigdo. Debian 10 (Buster) was released in July 2019, adding support for
Secure Boot and enabling
AppArmor by default. Debian 11 (Bullseye) was released in August 2021, enabling persistency in the system journal, adding support for driverless scanning, and containing kernel-level support for
exFAT filesystems. Debian 12 (Bookworm) was released on June 10, 2023, including various improvements and features, increasing the supported Linux kernel to version 6.1, and leveraging new "Emerald" artwork. Debian 12 also was the first version under a revised Debian Social Contract that includes non-free firmware in its installation media by default, if and when the installer detects that it is needed for installed hardware to function, such as with Wi-Fi cards. Debian 14 has been announced to have the code name Forky, and Debian 15 has been announced to have the code name Duke. Debian is under continuous development and new packages are uploaded to
unstable every day. Throughout Debian's lifetime, both the Debian distribution and its website have won various awards from different organizations, including Server Distribution of the Year 2011, The best Linux distro of 2011, and a
Best of the Net award for October 1998. On December 2, 2015,
Microsoft announced that they would offer Debian as an endorsed distribution on the
Azure cloud platform. Debian has also been made available for installation in Microsoft's
Windows Subsystem for Linux, which allows a user to install a tightly integrated Debian virtual machine within Windows. == Features ==