The long awaited Debian 10 (code name buster) has finally been released. It has the latest software versions and boasts of 57,703 packages. Long term support (LTS) of 5 years has been promised as well to ensure security updates are available till mid 2024!
Debian 8 LTS is till June 2020
Debian 9 LTS is till June 2022
https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706
Debian 10 basically improves stability, security, and extends your support for the next 5 years. Its like updating from windows 8 to windows 10.
For those using Debian 8 the long term support ends mid next year, hence the obvious advantage to shifting to Debian 10 is extending your server support (including security updates) for the next 5 years!
Debian 10 also comes with new packages and new versions of all software.
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This new release of Debian again comes with a lot more software than its predecessor stretch; the distribution includes over 13370 new packages, for a total of over 57703 packages. Most of the software in the distribution has been updated: over 35532 software packages (this is 62% of all packages in stretch).
<--snip--For servers this means we get Apache 2.4.38, and PHP 7.3 (for those using Debian 8, its a jump from PHP 5.6)
Debian 10 is also more secure with
- AppArmor an access control framework for restricting programs’ capabilities
- The improved UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface)
- Secure Boot support prevents loading unsigned code
you can get more details on whats new at
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.html