First impressions of Debian 12
Bookworm: "(Sighs) I don't know why this couldn't have waited until morning, Ken, but here you go."
(As "Ken" walks away, Bookworm notices that "he's" wearing high heels)
~ Toy Story 3 ~
The universal operating system Debian 12 Bookworm was released on 10th June 2023. Debian announced the brand-new version with LTS for 5 years.
All details are well described in debian.org news article:
Summarized the following recent packages are included in Debian 12:
Apache 2.4.57, BIND DNS Server 9.18, Cryptsetup 2.6, Dovecot MTA 2.3.19, Emacs 28.2, Exim 4.96, GIMP 2.10.34, GNU Compiler Collection 12.2, GnuPG 2.2.40, Inkscape 1.2.2, The GNU C Library 2.36, lighthttpd 1.4.69, LibreOffice 7.4, Linux-Kernel 6.1, LLVM/Clang-Toolchain 13.0.1, 14.0 and 15.0.6, MariaDB 10.11, Nginx 1.22, OpenJDK 17, OpenLDAP 2.5.13, OpenSSH 9.2p1, Perl 5.36, PHP 8.2, Postfix MTA 3.7, PostgreSQL 15, Python 3, 3.11.2, Rustc 1.63, Samba 4.17, systemd 252, Vim 9.0
Another interesting package that can be installed is "shiny-server" a product developed by "Posit Software PBC" which allows you to host and manage "Shiny" applications on a web server. Shiny makes it easy to build interactive web applications straight from R, without needing to write HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
Also, a new non-free firmware repository has been introduced, consisting of non-free firmware packages split from Debian's non-free repository. Those upgrading from Debian 11 to Debian 12 will have to add the new non-free firmware repository to their sources.list files.
Debian 12 follows its approach of a multi-purpose operating system. I've installed Bookworm on a Lenovo Laptop and noticed differences to it's former versions right away. The netinstall ISO which included drivers for the Wi-Fi module made it much more convenient to follow the installation procedure.
Additionally "/var/log/syslog" vanished. Logs now can be seen via journalctl directly. That's definitely a change I'm going to have to get used to.