Debian Buster Release due soon

Debian Buster (Debian 10) has been in development for the last few years, and it is expected to be released about the middle of this year.

As was described in some earlier posts, I have had Buster running on some of my systems in the past, but not in the last year or so. However I am now slowly upgrading my systems one by one to it. First up is pc4, and from there, mediapc or the bedroom pc will probably be next. This depends on the result for pc4. Since Qgis releases above 3.4 now require Buster, there is an impetus for me to want to move to Buster as soon as it is available, which is the reason I have started evaluating the impending release. The release cycle hard freeze is currently about a week away, so it is getting nearer to the release being ready.

mainpc and serverpc won't be upgraded until the release is out, and probably serverpc before mainpc is the order in which the upgrade will happen. Upgrade in all cases is by using the inbuilt upgrade system, which is fairly simple to use.

• Switch to a command window (ctrl-alt-F1) and log in as root. 
• Change /etc/apt/sources.list package sources from stretch to buster and save. 
• Then type in apt update and wait for the packages list to update.
• Type in apt upgrade to install the list of new packages (over 1000 for the first computer I upgraded). 
• Once it has finished that process then type apt dist-upgrade to update from stretch to buster.
• There will be a list of packages that are no longer needed so type in apt autoremove to discard them.

I am currently expecting to have all my computers running buster within a couple of days as all the upgrades have gone smoothly, provided the above spec is followed exactly. Also pc4 has been upgraded from XFCE to LXQt, meaning none of my computers are running XFCE now. LXQt on Buster looks better than the previous versions I evaluated on Stretch, probably because it is now version 0.14, up from 0.11.