Hello Linux Geeksters. The first Alpha build of Debian 8.0 Jessie has been recently released, being now available for free download.
As you may know, the Debian engineers are working at two distros simultaneously, at a stable one (now Debian 7 Wheezy) and at a testing one (now Debian 8 Jessie).
Among others, the Debian 8 Jessie installer got a number of fixes, a menu selection support has been added in GRUB, Kernel 3.13 has been used by default and the FreeBSD kernel has reached version 9.2. Despite the fact that the Alpha 1 image comes with XFCE as the default DE (this will be reevaluated in August 2014), separate images of Debian 8 KDE and Debian 8 GNOME are available.
Also worth mentioning, Debian 8 Jessie (stable) will be the first Debian system using systemd as the default init service manager.
For more information, see the mailing lists. Download Debian 8 Jessie Alpha 1 from here.