A couple of weeks ago Debian 9 was officially released.

For the time-pressed Linux geeks among us, here are some of the highlights of this new release.

• It remains ‘freer’ than Ubuntu, as it is still not shipping with any proprietary software
• The Mozilla Foundation and Debian have settled their dispute, meaning that Firefox and Thunderbird can now be used under their real names instead of ‘Iceweasel’
• It still doesn’t support Secure Boot, being one of the few major distros not to do so
• It supports the 4.9 Kernel, released in Dec of 2016
• MySQL is replaced by MariaDB, a very sensible choice
• PHP 7 and Pyhon 3.5 are now supported. Neither are brand new, but considering the long cycle Linux distros tend to have before supporting newer versions of core programming languages, this is a nice addition to the list.