Debian Live CDs are also available for download

Apr 26, 2015 01:48 GMT  ·  By

The Debian Project had the great pleasure of announcing today, April 26, that the Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) computer operating system has been made available for download on mirrors worldwide.

Dubbed Jessie, Debian 8 is one of the most anticipated distributions of GNU/Linux for 2015. The major release includes dozens of new features, support for new hardware components and architectures, stability and security improvements, as well as many updated core components and applications.

"There's a new sheriff in town. And her name is Jessie. We're happy to announce the release of Debian 8.0, codenamed Jessie," says Ana Guerrero Lopez on behalf of the Debian Release Team. "Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade? You are just an apt-get dist-upgrade away from Jessie!"

Here's what's new in Debian GNU/Linux 8 Jessie

Prominent features of Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) include the GNOME 3.14, KDE 4.11, and Xfce 4.10 desktop environments, systemd as the default init system (designed as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit), OpenJDK 7 as the default Java runtime, and improved hardware support.

Support for many UEFI firmware has been implemented in the installer, but UEFI Secure Boot is not supported. Among the updated applications, we can mention LibreOffice 4.3, Calligra 2.8, GNUcash 2.6, Gnumeric 1.12, Abiword 3.0, and Evolution 3.12.

Download Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) right now via Softpedia or directly from the debian.org website, where you will find both installable-only and Live CD ISO images (Standard, Cinnamon, and MATE) for 64 and 32-bit computer architectures.

Of course, you will find Debian ISO images for numerous other architectures on the project's website, including the newly supported ARM64 and PowerPC64EL ones. In addition, you can also download Debian Live GNOME, Debian Live KDE, Debian Live LXDE, and Debian Live Xfce ISO images from Softpedia.

In other similar news, the Debian LTS team will decide this summer if Debian 8 is eligible for becoming an LTS (Long Term Support) release. For more details, you should check the official release notes for your architecture of choice.