Debian is a free operating system. It is a distribution of an operating system known as the GNU operating system, which can be used with various kernels, including Linux, kFreeBSD, and Hurd. In combination with these kernels, the operating system can be referred to as Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Debian GNU/Hurd, respectively. Debian GNU/Linux is one of the most complete and popular GNU/Linux distributions, on which many others, like Ubuntu, are based.

Brief history 
The Debian Project officially started on August 16th, 1993, led by Ian Murdock. He was a computer programmer. Today, in this project, Debian is developed by more than 1,000 computer specialists all over the world.

The name "Debian" was taken after Ian Murdock and his wife Debra. Some people say or pronounce 'deb-ee-n' but others also say 'de-bi-an' or 'de-bai-an' and in Japan 'de-bi-a-n' and so on.

Development steps 
Software packages in development are either uploaded to the project distribution named unstable (also known as sid), or to the experimental repository. Software packages uploaded to unstable are normally versions stable enough to be released by the original upstream developer, but with the added Debian-specific packaging and other modifications introduced by Debian developers. These additions may be new and untested. Software not ready yet for the unstable distribution is typically placed in the experimental repository.

After a version of a software package has remained in unstable for a certain length of time (depending on how urgent the changes are), that package is automatically moved to the testing distribution. The package's move to testing happens only if no serious (release-critical) bugs in the package are reported and if other software needed for package functionality qualifies for inclusion in testing.

Since updates to Debian software packages between official releases do not contain new features, some choose to use the testing and unstable distributions for their newer packages. However, these distributions are less tested than stable, and unstable does not receive timely security updates.  In particular, incautious upgrades to working unstable packages can sometimes seriously break software functionality. Since September 9, 2005  the testing distributions security updates have been provided by the testing security team.

After the packages in testing have matured and the goals for the next release are met, the testing distribution becomes the next stable release. The latest stable release of Debian (Buster) is 10.0, released on July 6, 2019. The next release is codenamed "Bullseye".

Release history 

 11 architectures + 1 additional ARM binary ABI (armel)
 9 architectures with Linux kernel + 2 architectures with FreeBSD kernel

Due to an incident involving a CD vendor who made an unofficial and broken release labeled 1.0, an official 1.0 release was never made.

For other platforms 
Debian has been ported to different architectures or platforms. One version, which is based on the developer release (sid) that has been ported to the Xbox is called Xebian.

Package 
Debian's official software package repository includes, for example, UNetbootin.

Related pages
 List of Linux distributions

References 

Notes

Other websites 
 http://www.debian.org/ - Debian Project Homepage
 

Linux distributions
Debian
X86-64 Linux distributions