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By Joe Brockmeier
August 20, 2025

After more than two years of development, the Debian Project has released its new stable version, Debian 13 (“trixie”). The release comes with the usual bounty of
upgraded packages and more than 14,000 new packages; it also debuts Advanced Package Tool
(APT) 3.0 as the default package manager and makes 64-bit
RISC-V a supported architecture. There are few surprises with trixie,
which is exactly what many Linux users are hoping for—a free
operating system that just works as expected.

Debian’s stable
releases are aptly named; the project prioritizes stability over
shipping the latest software. The freeze
schedule for trixie called for a soft freeze in April, which meant
that (for example) the KDE Plasma 6.4
release in June was too late to make the cut—even though trixie
was not released until August. Users who prefer to live on the edge
will want to run another distribution or follow Debian development by
running the testing release
that previews the next stable version—Debian 14 (“forky”). Truly
adventurous users may take their chances with the unstable (“sid”)
release.

That said, trixie is up-to-date enough for many folks; it includes
GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, Xfce 4.20, GNU
Emacs 30.1, GnuPG 2.4.7, LibreOffice 25.2, and
more. Under the hood, it includes the most recent Linux LTS kernel
(6.12.41), GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 14.2, GNU C Library (glibc)
2.41, LLVM/Clang 19, Python 3.13, Rust 1.85, and
systemd 257. The release notes have a section
for well-known software that compares the version in Debian 12
against Debian 13. While some of the versions lag a bit behind the
upstream, they are not woefully outdated.

The project now supports
six major hardware architectures: x86-64/amd64, 32-bit Arm with a
hardware FPU (armhf), 64-bit Arm (arm64), IBM POWER8 or newer
(ppc64el), IBM S/390 (s390x), and 64-bit RISC-V. The i386 architecture
is not supported for trixie, though the project continues to
build some i386 packages to run on 64-bit systems; users with i386 systems cannot upgrade to
trixie. The MIPS
architectures (mipsel and mis64el) have also been removed in trixie.

The Arm EABI
(armel) port that targets older 32-bit Arm devices prior to Arm v7 is
still supported with trixie, but this release is the end of the
line. There is no installation media for armel systems, but users who
have bookworm installed can upgrade to trixie if they have supported
hardware: the Raspberry Pi 1, Zero, and Zero W are the
only devices mentioned in
the release notes.

Upgrades from bookworm are supported, of course. The release
notes suggest that users convert APT source files to the DEB822 format
before the upgrade. APT 3.0
includes an “apt modernize-sources” command to convert APT data
source files to DEB822, but that is not available in bookworm. Users are
also expected to remove
all third-party packages prior to running the upgrade. I tested
the upgrade on one of my servers, after taking a snapshot to roll back
to if needed, and all went smoothly. Users who are considering an
upgrade should read the release notes carefully before forging ahead;
in particular, users should be aware that it’s possible (but not
certain) for network interface names to change on upgrade.

Installation

For users who want to start fresh, Debian offers a
variety of installer images and download methods; users can choose
a 64MB minimal ISO image with the netboot
installer, all the way up to a set of Blu-ray images. The project
recommends using BitTorrent or Jigsaw
Download (jigdo) for the largest images. BitTorrent probably needs
no introduction, but jigdo is not as well-known. Jigdo is a method of
downloading all of the individual packages for an image from multiple
mirrors and then assembling them into an ISO image on the user’s
machine. It was a bit fiddly to use jigdo to download an image, but
not overly so—and the speed of the whole process was comparable
to simply downloading an ISO of the same size.

Debian’s network
install (“netinst”) image is probably the best option for server
installations and for experienced Linux users; it includes the
packages required for a base install and then fetches the remaining
software from Debian mirrors. Unlike the tiny netboot image, it
includes the option of using either the graphical installer or the
text-based installer.

The installer is a bit of a throwback to an earlier era when users
were expected to know a lot more about the workings of a Linux system.
Users who have only worked with distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu
will notice that installing Debian requires many more steps than other
popular distributions. For example, many desktop distributions have
eliminated the step of setting a password for the root
user—instead, it is generally assumed that the primary user will
also be the system administrator, so the default is to give the
primary user sudo privileges instead. Debian does not take that
approach; in fact, there is no way to give a user sudo privileges
during installation. Setting up sudo has to be done manually after
the installation is completed Update: Users can skip creation of a root account and the installer will then set up the regular user as an administrator with sudo permissions. Apologies for the error.

For some folks, installing Debian will be a bit of a chore and may
even be confusing for users who are new to Linux. For example, the
text-mode installer requires users to specify the device for GRUB boot
loader installation, without providing a default. If one chooses an
invalid partition, the installer tells the user that the operation has
failed and drops back to a menu listing all the installation
steps. Presumably if one picks the wrong partition it will
happily install GRUB to that and render the system unbootable. This is
not insurmountable for experienced Linux users, but it would no doubt
be a hurdle for many users.

More experienced Linux users are likely to appreciate the
amount of control offered by the installer. For example, Fedora’s
recent web-based installer makes it difficult to even find the option to
perform custom partitioning. Debian has a guided partitioning option
for those who do not want to fuss with it, but the option to create
custom partitions is not hidden from the user.

Debian has a better installation option for newer Linux users,
though it is easy to miss: the live install images, which
use the Calamares installer. Its
workflow is more akin to the installation process one finds with
Fedora and Ubuntu; it also sets up the primary user with sudo
privileges rather than creating a root password. Unfortunately,
the live images are not listed on the main page for installer
images—though they are mentioned, briefly, in the release
notes.

The Debian installer also has the option of using a Braille display
and/or speech synthesizer voice for the installation. I have not tried
these options, but they are available for users who need them.

X.org

Many distributions are in the process of phasing out X.org support
for GNOME and KDE as the upstream projects have started doing so.
For example, Fedora will remove X.org session support
for GNOME in Fedora 43, and the plan is for Ubuntu to do the same
in its upcoming 25.10 release. GNOME will be completely removing X.org
support in GNOME 49, which is planned for September.

Much has already been said about this, of course, and there is
likely little new left to be said or that needs to be
said. However, for users who still need or want X.org support,
Debian 13 includes X.org sessions for GNOME and KDE. In testing
trixie, I’ve spent some time in the GNOME and KDE X.org sessions as
well as the Wayland sessions; if there are any gotchas or horrible
bugs, I haven’t encountered them (yet). This might be a compelling
reason for some folks to switch to (or stick with) Debian.

Trying trixie

I use Debian for my personal web site and blogs, but it has been
quite some time since I used it as my primary desktop operating
system. Debian (and Ubuntu) derivatives, such as Linux Mint and Pop!_OS, yes—but it’s been
several years since I’ve used vanilla Debian on the desktop for
more than casual tinkering.

The Debian release announcement boasts about the number of packages
included in trixie: 64,419 packages total, with 14,100 added and more
than 6,000 removed as obsolete
since bookworm. That is quite a few packages, but falls short of some
other distributions. For example, “dnf repoquery --repo=fedora
--available” shows more than 76,000 packages available for
Fedora 42.

After installing Debian, I went to install some of my preferred
software, such as aerc,
Ghostty, niri, and Speech Note. The aerc
packages in trixie are current, but Ghostty and niri are not packaged
for Debian at all. Ghostty is written in Zig, which is also not
available, so users who want to build it from source will need to
install Zig separately and then build Ghostty. Speech Note is packaged
as a Flatpak, but Debian does not enable Flatpaks or Flathub in the
GNOME Software Store by default. Users who want Flatpaks on Debian via
Flathub will need to install the flatpak package and manually
add the Flathub repo:

    flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub 
      https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Users will need to add the gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
package for Flatpak support in GNOME Software, and
plasma-discover-backend-flatpak to add it to
KDE Discover.

Trixie ships with the Firefox extended-support release (ESR) by
default: Firefox
128, which was released in July 2024. Happily,
Mozilla offers a Debian
repository for those who want to run more current versions. Even
better, there is a little-advertised utility called extrepo that
has a curated list of external repositories users might want to enable
for Debian. To enable the Mozilla repository, for example, a user only
needs to install extrepo, run
“extrepo enable mozilla” as root (or with
sudo), update the package cache, and look for the regular
Firefox package. In all, extrepo includes more than 160 external
repositories for applications like Docker CE, Signal, and Syncthing. Unfortunately, the
extrepo utility does not have a separate “list” command to show the
available repositories, though running “extrepo search”
with no search parameter will return all of its DEB822-formatted
repository entries. Some of the software is
in an external repository due to a non-free license, other software (like
Firefox) just has a development cycle that outpaces Debian’s.

As one might expect, the Debian desktop experience is not
dramatically different from other distributions; GNOME 48 on
Debian is little different than GNOME 48 on Fedora, and the same
is true for KDE, Xfce, etc. The primary difference is that users can
expect more or less the same desktop experience running Debian stable
in two years that they have today, which is not necessarily true for
other distributions.

Miscellaneous

One of the features in Debian 13 is something that most users
won’t notice or appreciate at all: a transition to
64-bit time_t on 32-bit architectures, to avoid the Year 2038 problem. The
short version is that 32-bit integers cannot hold a Unix epoch
timestamp for dates after January 19, 2038. That may seem
like a distant concern, even irrelevant for Debian trixie; after all,
Debian 13 is only supported by the project until 2030. However,
the project expects that some 32-bit embedded systems will still be running
trixie in 2038, so Debian developers did the heavy lifting to complete
the transition to 64-bit time_t now. LWN covered the early planning
for this in 2023.

By now, most users have retired their DSA
SSH keys; if not, now is the time to do so. DSA keys were disabled by
default with OpenSSH in 2015, and they are entirely disabled now with
the openssh-client and openssh-server packages in
trixie. If there is a device that can, for some reason, only be
connected to with DSA, users can install the
openssh-client-ssh1 package and use ssh1 to make the
connection.

As we covered in
June 2024, Debian 13 has switched to using a tmpfs
filesystem for the /tmp directory. By default, Debian
allocates up to 50% of memory to /tmp, but this can be
changed by following the instructions
in the release notes. Note that this also applies to systems that
are upgraded to trixie from bookworm.

Forward to forky

Debian Project Leader (DPL) Andreas Tille recently
announced “Debian’s 100000th birthday“, so clearly the project has a
bit of experience with putting out solid releases. Granted, he was
reporting the number in binary, but even when converted to decimal
numbers (32 years), it’s an impressive track record.

While testing, I installed trixie on a couple of systems, including
a new Framework 12-inch laptop. My original intent was to just see
whether Debian had any problems with the new hardware (it didn’t), but
now I’m leaning toward sticking with Debian on this system for a while
to see if stability suits me.

With trixie out the door, the Debian Project has already turned its
attention to working on forky, which has no release date set. Debian has
stuck to a loose schedule of a new stable release roughly every two
years. Most likely we will see Debian 14 sometime in 2027. After
the forky release, trixie will still receive updates from Debian’s
security team through 2028, and then from its LTS team through 2030.

As of yet, there are no major new features or changes announced for
forky; it seems likely that those will be coming to light in the
coming months now that the project has trixie out the door. LWN will,
of course, be reporting on those developments as they happen.