Debian 9 is available!

Congratulations to everyone who has played a part in the creation of Debian GNU/Linux 9.0! It’s a great release, I’ve installed the pre-release versions for friends, family and colleagues and so far the feedback has been very positive.

This release is dedicated to Ian Murdock, who founded the Debian project in 1993, and sadly passed away on 28 December 2015. On the Debian ISO files a dedication statement is available on /doc/dedication/dedication-9.0.txt

Here’s a copy of the dedication text:

Dedicated to Ian Murdock
------------------------

Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian project, passed away
on 28th December 2015 at his home in San Francisco. He was 42.

It is difficult to exaggerate Ian's contribution to Free
Software. He led the Debian Project from its inception in
1993 to 1996, wrote the Debian manifesto in January 1994 and
nurtured the fledgling project throughout his studies at
Purdue University.

Ian went on to be founding director of Linux International,
CTO of the Free Standards Group and later the Linux
Foundation, and leader of Project Indiana at Sun
Microsystems, which he described as "taking the lesson
that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing
that for Solaris".

Debian's success is testament to Ian's vision. He inspired
countless people around the world to contribute their own free
time and skills. More than 350 distributions are known to be
derived from Debian.

We therefore dedicate Debian 9 "stretch" to Ian.

-- The Debian Developers

During this development cycle, the amount of source packages in Debian grew from around 21 000 to around 25 000 packages, which means that there’s a whole bunch of new things Debian can make your computer do. If you find something new in this release that you like, post about it on your favourite social networks, using the hashtag #newinstretch – or look it up to see what others have discovered!