Debian is an operating system distribution built on the principles of free software, supporting a wide range of hardware architectures and developed with contributions from volunteers worldwide. While primarily using the Linux kernel, it comes bundled with GNU tools. The goal of the Debian Project is to provide a system composed entirely of free software, offering reliability, stability, and a vast software archive.

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Foundation and Early Years

The Debian Project was initiated by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. In the Debian Manifesto published by Murdock, it was stated that the distribution would be open, carefully developed, and composed entirely of free software, in line with the spirit of the Linux and GNU communities.

Between November 1994 and November 1995, Debian was supported by the GNU Project, after which it continued as an independent community initiative.

Leadership

Debian has a democratic leadership process, and the project leader is elected annually. Since its foundation, the following individuals have served as leaders:

Ian Murdock (1993–1996)
Bruce Perens (1996–1997)
Ian Jackson (1998)
Wichert Akkerman (1999–2001)
Ben Collins (2001–2002)
Bdale Garbee (2002–2003)
Martin Michlmayr (2003–2005)
Branden Robinson (2005–2006)
Anthony Towns (2006–2007)
Sam Hocevar (2007–2008)
Steve McIntyre (2008–2010)
Stefano Zacchiroli (2010–2013)
Lucas Nussbaum (2013–2015)
Neil McGovern (2015–2016)
Mehdi Dogguy (2016–2017)
Chris Lamb (2017–2019)
Sam Hartman (2019–2020)
Jonathan Carter (2020–2024)
Andreas Tille (2024– ).

Version Development

0.x Series

The first test releases of Debian were published in 1993. Debian 0.91 (January 1994) was released with a simple package system for testing purposes. With 0.93R5 (March 1995), it switched to the dpkg package manager, and 0.93R6 (November 1995) was the last version to use the a.out binary format.

1.x and 2.x Series

Debian 1.1 “Buzz” (June 1996) was the first release using the ELF format and included 474 packages. 1.2 “Rex” (December 1996) reached 848 packages, and 1.3 “Bo” (June 1997) reached 974 packages.

Debian 2.0 “Hamm” (July 1998) introduced multi-architecture support (Intel and Motorola 68000) and switched to the libc6 library. 2.1 “Slink” (March 1999) added Alpha and SPARC architectures and introduced the APT package manager.

3.x and 4.x Series

Debian 3.0 “Woody” (July 2002) supported additional architectures such as ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, MIPSel, and s/390. Debian 3.1 “Sarge” (June 2005) included the new debian-installer and applications like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

Debian 4.0 “Etch” (April 2007) added AMD64 support, removed m68k support, and offered a graphical installation option.

5.x and 6.x Series

Debian 5.0 “Lenny” (February 2009) introduced new ARM ports, increased the number of packages, and implemented a micro-versioning system. Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” (February 2011) added Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ports and supported DKMS and parallel init.

7.x–10.x Series

Debian 7 “Wheezy” (May 2013) enhanced support for multiple desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE). Debian 8 “Jessie” (April 2015) transitioned to systemd. Debian 9 “Stretch” (June 2017) focused on security and package updates. Debian 10 “Buster” (July 2019) enabled AppArmor security modules by default.

11.x and 12.x Series

Debian 11 “Bullseye” (August 2021) added exFAT support and driverless printing. Debian 12 “Bookworm” (June 2023) introduced the “non-free-firmware” component to improve hardware compatibility. Debian 13 “Trixie” is currently in development and available as a testing release.

Debian