Den officielle Debian-distribution leveres nu på 9-10 binære dvd'er eller 61-69 binære cd'er (afhængig af arkitektur) og 8 kilde-dvd'er eller 46 cd'er med kildekode. Herudover findes der en dvd til flere arkitekturer med en begrænset del af udgivelsen for arkitekturerne amd64 og i386 sammen med kildekoden. Debian udgives også som Blu-ray diskaftryk på (BD): 2 diskaftryk for hver af arkitekturerne amd64 og i386, eller ét med kildekoden. Af pladshensyn er visse meget store pakker udeladt fra cd'erne, men de findes på dvd og BD, da der er bedre plads til dem her.

Being upgraded to version 3.14, the new GNOME desktop brings many new features and usability improvements.

The design of the GNOME shell has been updated. The bottom message tray is larger, easier to use and less prone to appear accidentally. A new system status area in the upper right corner puts all useful settings in the same place.

The screensaver has been replaced by a "lock screen" that still brings minimal functionality when the user is away. For example, you can pause the music, be informed of a new e-mail, or change the screen brightness, all of that without entering a password. Pressing the Escape key or starting to type the password brings back the login prompt. The GNOME display manager uses the exact same design for consistency.

Several applications, including the Nautilus file manager, the gedit text editor, and the evince document viewer have seen their design made much more compact, merging the window titlebar with the toolbar. This leaves much more room for the documents the user is working on. The standard dialog boxes have undergone similar changes.

Support for touch screens has been fully integrated, including intuitive gestures based on multiple finger movements. GNOME now also supports high resolution (HiDPI) screens, taking full advantage of fine pixeling for the clearest rendering.

GNOME supports geolocation, and includes a smooth mapping and navigation application.

The user documentation is much more complete, and includes video tutorials for new users.

More information can be found in the GNOME 3.14 release notes.

Introduced in Debian 7, systemd is now the default init system. It provides advanced monitoring, logging, and service management capabilities.

Selv om den er designet som en direkte sysvinit-erstatning og som sådan gør brug af eksisterende SysV init-skripter, så kan pakken systemd installeres sikkert sammen med sysvinit og startes via kerneindstillingen init=/bin/systemd. Pakken systemd-sysv tilbyder /sbin/init-erstatningen.

For yderligere information om dette emne, så se Debians wiki.

TODO: Need to include stuff from <5447EC14.2070502@debian.org>

The legacy secure sockets layer protocol SSLv3 has been disabled in this release. Many system cryptography libraries as well as servers and client applications have been compiled or configured without support for this protocol.

The Linux kernel features a security mechanism which nullifies many symlink attacks. It is enabled in the Debian Linux kernel by default. /tmp-related bugs which are rendered non-exploitable by this mechanism are not treated as security vulnerabilities. If you use a custom Linux kernel you should enable it using a sysctl setting:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/protected_symlinks

In some rare cases the security support for a package shipped in a Debian release needs to be terminated prior to the end of support for the full distribution. Jessie provides a new package (debian-security-support) which emits a warning if support for a package needs to be terminated in advance. It also documents packages where the scope of security support is limited. As such, it is recommended to install debian-security-support on all security-relevant systems.

Continuing on the path set by Wheezy, more packages have been built with hardened compiler flags. Also, the stack protector flag has been switched to stack-protector-strong for extra hardening. Note that the hardened build flags are not enabled by default in gcc, so they are not used automatically when locally building software. The package hardening-wrapper can provide a gcc with these flags enabled.

New in this release is the needrestart package. When installed, it will perform a check after each APT upgrade session. If any services running on the system require a restart to take advantage of changes in the upgraded packages then it offers to perform these restarts. It is recommended to install needrestart to ensure that security updates in libraries are propagated to running services.

Along with the older MySQL 5.5, Jessie ships the new MariaDB 10.0. See the Debian MySQL Team wiki page for more information. Only one of them is likely to be included in Debian 9.

Note that upstream support for MySQL 5.5 will cease in December 2017 (and Debian security support will have to follow that), while MariaDB 10.0 will receive upstream security support until March 2019.

The Horde Application Framework is available in Jessie, via the php-horde package.

The Debian Games Team proudly presents the Debian Games Blend consisting of 33 metapackages which simplify the installation of games per category. The selection includes among many others strategy, simulation, card, and programming games. Debian Games also offers developers a quick way to install recommended software for developing games in the C++, Java, Perl, or Python 3 programming languages. Content developers will find useful tools for creating game art in games-content-dev. The project homepage provides screenshots and further information and offers a compact overview about all games including Debian's finest games.