The Debian Project today released the first alpha development version of the installer for the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” series, which is expected to be released next year.
Work on Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” started a few months ago, and as of today there is also an official installer for Linux/Debian early adopters and friends who want a taste of the new features and improvements.
I should mention that I'm already using Debian 12 without any problems, before the official installer was released.
The Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” installer supports the latest Linux 5.19 kernel series and brings several improvements, starting with Windows 11 OS detection if you plan to dual boot Debian with Windows.
Also added support for new ARM devices such as the Banana Pi BPI M2 Ultra, ODROID-C4, ODROID-HC4, ODROID-N2 and ODROID-N2+, the Linux Librem 5r4 (Evergreen) smartphone from Purism, as well as the modular laptop MNT Reform Version 2.
It also supports new RISC-V devices, including SiFive HiFive Unmatched and BeagleV Starlight Beta, as well as the Microchip PolarFire-SoC Icicle Kit, a low-cost development platform that enables evaluation of the RISC-V microprocessor subsystem.
The upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm”, will have screen reader support enabled by default for the Cinnamon desktop environment, auto-start of speech synthesis, easier multipath device detection, and support for multiple initrd paths.
The installer also supports detection of NTFS3 drivers for Linux kernels 5.15+ (in addition to NTFS and NTFS-3G) and detection of Alpine Linux initramfs files. Another interesting change is that the installer no longer offers experimental support for dmraid.
Further details on the upcoming changes can be found in the announcement posted earlier today by Cyril Brulebois. The final release of Debian Bookworm is expected in the summer of 2023.
