The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short.

After 26 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 9 (code name Stretch), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.

Debian 9 is dedicated to the project's founder Ian Murdock, who passed away on 28 December 2015.

In Stretch, the default MySQL variant is now MariaDB. The replacement of packages for MySQL 5.5 or 5.6 by the MariaDB 10.1 variant will happen automatically upon upgrade.

Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of Stretch, and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present in the archive for more than 10 years.

Thanks to the Reproducible Builds project, over 90% of the source packages included in Debian 9 will build bit-for-bit identical binary packages. This is an important verification feature which protects users from malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive.

Administrators and those in security-sensitive environments can be comforted in the knowledge that the X display system no longer requires root privileges to run.

The Stretch release is the first version of Debian to feature the modern branch of GnuPG in the gnupg package. This brings with it elliptic curve cryptography, better defaults, a more modular architecture, and improved smartcard support. We will continue to supply the classic branch of GnuPG as gnupg1 for people who need it, but it is now deprecated.

Debug packages are easier to obtain and use in Debian 9 Stretch. A new dbg-sym repository can be added to the APT source list to provide debug symbols automatically for many packages.

The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support first introduced in Wheezy continues to be greatly improved in Stretch, and also supports installing on 32-bit UEFI firmware with a 64-bit kernel. The Debian live images now include support for UEFI booting as a new feature, too.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:

• Apache 2.4.25
• Asterisk 13.14.1
• Chromium 59.0.3071.86
• Firefox 45.9 (in the firefox-esr package)
• GIMP 2.8.18
• an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.22
• GNU Compiler Collection 6.3
• GnuPG 2.1
• Golang 1.7
• KDE Frameworks 5.28, KDE Plasma 5.8, and KDE Applications 16.08 and 16.04 for PIM components
• LibreOffice 5.2
• Linux 4.9
• MariaDB 10.1
• MATE 1.16
• OpenJDK 8
• Perl 5.24
• PHP 7.0
• PostgreSQL 9.6
• Python 2.7.13 and 3.5.3
• Ruby 2.3
• Samba 4.5
• systemd 232
• Thunderbird 45.8
• Tomcat 8.5
• Xen Hypervisor
• the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment
• more than 51,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from a bit more of 25,000 source packages.

With this broad selection of packages and its traditional wide architecture support, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian's archive ensure that Stretch fulfills the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release.