Most notable changes to Debian 10 (buster). Removal of ifconfig from the net-tools package – changed to using ip – which falls in line with other distrubtions. Here is a brief overview of some version changes:

System

• Linux kernel 4.19 (from 4.9)
• systemd 241 (from 232 – which has forced many changes)

Web Servers

• Apache 2.4.38 (from 2.4.25)
• nginx 1.14 (from 1.10)

Programming Languages

• Go 1.11 (from 1.7)
• Node.js 10.15.2 (from 4.8.2)
• PHP 7.3 (from 7.0)
• Python 3.7.2 (from 3.5.3)
• Ruby 2.5 (from 2.3)
• Rust 1.34 (from 1.24)

Database Servers

• MariaDB 10.3 (from 10.1)
• PostgreSQL 11 (from 9.6)

Moved from iptables to nftables for firewall rules and packet filtering.

The biggest change for me as a SysAdmin is the move from iptables to nftables. I have wrote modules for iptables rules and rulesets within my cross-platform Linux Administration software. I will be writing some new software for nftables. The official Debian documentation is not great; they placed a link to the official nftables wiki, but the tools which you need to use (which seem to be half written) cannot be installed on Debian 10. There is an apt package with the tools to convert iptables rulesets to nftables rulesets named iptables-nftables-compat; as stated you cannot install this with a default Debian 10 apt list – so you may have to do this before upgrading. They state in the official documentation for nftables to use a tool named iptables-restore-translate; I have used this tool but still had to go through my rulesets to change certain things that it did not pick up. Be very careful using these tools as not everything in iptables rulesets gets translated correctly. I am seeing a lot of posts about this move from sysadmins online at the moment.

Another big change you will notice is the move to using systemctl for a lot of commands that you used to be able to run in bash, this is down to the new systemd version.