So this weekend's big news (for me, at least), is the release of Debian Wheezy.
Squeeze (Debian 6.0) was absolutely amazing and will be missed, but the new distro looks like it's bringing a lot of interesting improvements.

What's new?

It'd be inconceivable to describe everything new in this release. After all it's the result of over 2 years of work by developers on over 35,000 packages. It's huge. If you want something more exhaustive you should read more in the official release announcement.

Here are some highlights I found most interesting:

Optional support for systemd
Support for AppArmor
Backports are now included in the official mirrors
Multiarch support (it means you can mix architectures, for instance mixing 64bits and 32bits packages)
Inclusion of OpenStack packages
Python2.7 is the default Python2.x interpreter
Debian/kFreeBSD is getting more attention than before (yay for ZFS goodness).
ffmpeg is replaced by libav
For people interested in virtualization, OpenVZ is dropped in favor of more modern solutions (LXC ftw!)
Java6 is dropped

A word about the Debian release cycle

The funny thing about "Wheezy" is that it's absolutely not a new distro. It's actually over 2 years old, and several distributions (like the last 4 versions of Ubuntu) have been based off this version. See Debian has a very particular way of releasing their software. Debian comes in 3 versions:

Stable: The "current" version. By default it will get very little updates.
Testing: The "next" version. It's actively worked on by the developers. It will be the following Stable "when it's ready".
Unstable: Traditionally called "Sid", this is a staging area where packages are immediately uploaded.

Let's get one thing straight: Despite their names, "testing" and "unstable" are extremely useable. Ubuntu is traditionally based on a momentary snapshot of Debian "testing". "Unstable" is akin to a rolling-release. If you're familiar with distributions like ArchLinux or Gentoo, you know that it doesn't mean the system crashes often (if at all!).

Today's announcement is that the old "Testing" is becoming "Stable". A new "Testing" is going to get started soon, nicknamed "Jessie (Debian 8.0)".

How to upgrade from Squeeze
One last thing before I leave. If you have an existing Squeeze installation and you want to upgrade to Wheezy, you may want to follow this guide.