alt Hacker NewsDebian 13 “Trixie”
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Thank you to all the Debian volunteers that make Debian and all its derivatives possible. It's remarkable how many people and businesses have been enabled by your work. Thank you!
On a personal note, Trixie is very exciting for me because my side project, ntfy [1], was packaged [2] and is now included in Trixie. I only learned about the fact that it was included very late in cycle when the package maintainer asked for license clarifications. As a result the Debian-ized version of ntfy doesn't contain a web app (which is a reaaal bummer), and has a few things "patched out" (which is fine). I approached the maintainer and just recently added build tags [3] to make it easier to remove Stripe, Firebase and WebPush, so that the next Debian-ized version will not have to contain (so many) awkward patches.
As an "upstream maintainer", I must say it isn't obvious at all why the web app wasn't included. It was clearly removed on purpose [4], but I don't really know what to do to get it into the next Debian release. Doing an "apt install ntfy" is going to be quite disappointing for most if the web app doesn't work. Any help or guidance is very welcome!
[1] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ntfy
[3] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/pull/1420
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/ahmadkhalifa/ntfy/-/blob/debian/lat...
Congratulations!
Debian has been the stable footing of my Free computing life for three decades. Everything about their approach — from showing me Condorcet, organising stable chaos, moving forward by measured consensus, and basing everything on hard wrought principles — has had an effect on me in some way, from technical to social and back again.
I love this project and the immeasurable impact it has had on the world through their releases and culture.
With all my love, g’o xx
> i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!
OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.
A new APT sources format "debian.sources" is announced with trixie. The now older "sources.list" format is still supported, but is likely to be deprecated in a future Debian release.
See below:
APT is moving to a different format for configuring where it downloads packages from. The files /etc/apt/sources.list and *.list files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ are replaced by files still in that directory but with names ending in .sources, using the new, more readable (deb822 style) format. For details see sources.list(5). Examples of APT configurations in these notes will be given in the new deb822 format.
If your system is using multiple sources files then you will need to ensure they stay consistent.
- https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/upgradi...
"apt modernize-sources" command can be used to simulate and replace ".list" files with the new ".sources" format.
Modernizing will replace .list files with the new .sources format, add Signed-By values where they can be determined automatically, and save the old files into .list.bak files.
This command supports the 'signed-by' and 'trusted' options. If you have specified other options inside [] brackets, please transfer them manually to the output files; see sources.list(5) for a mapping.You can still use sysvinit, I've already tested servers and desktop builds.
From my build box:
chroot $MOUNTPOINT/ /bin/bash -c "http_proxy=$aptproxy apt-get -y --purge --allow remove-essential install sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils systemd-sysv- systemd-"
After this fix, sysvinit builds with debootstrap were almost identical as to bookworm. This includes for desktops.
As per with bookworm through buster, you'll still need something like this too:
$ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd
# this is the only systemd package that is required, so we up its priority first...
Package: libsystemd0
Pin: release trixie
Pin-Priority: 700
# exclude the rest
Package: systemd
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: *systemd*
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: systemd:i386
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: systemd:amd64
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1They only mentioned it briefly, and not by number, but this release includes 95%+ bit-for-bit reproducibility on AMD64, ARM64, and RISC-V across more than 30,000 packages (92% mean across all architectures).
Congratulations to the team--phenomenal work!
I see that systemd is still doing this thing where they are trying to strong-arm all Linux distros into arbitrary stuff that someone decided is the only right way to do something:
> 5.2.2. systemd message: System is tainted: unmerged-bin systemd upstream, since version 256, considers systems having separate /usr/bin and /usr/sbin directories noteworthy. At startup systemd emits a message to record this fact: System is tainted: unmerged-bin. It is recommended to ignore this message. Merging these directories manually is unsupported and will break future upgrades. Further details can be found in bug #1085370.
No option to disable this either, per discussion in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1085370
It can be a little hard to navigate to so the .torrent links for x86-64 are
Minimal: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-cd/deb...
Full: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-dvd/de...
Biggest change for me is /tmp behavior. In Debian 13 /tmp become RAM-disk by default (instead of files on the file system) and uses up to 50% of available ram. But as expected of Debian the release notes included an easy fix to restore normal /tmp behavior for people and applications that place many small or large files there.
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....
>"You can return to /tmp being a regular directory by running systemctl mask tmp.mount as root and rebooting."
I kind of wish the distros had decided on a new /tmpfs (or /tmp/tmpfs, etc) directory for applications to opt-in to using ram-disk rather than replacing /tmp and having to opt-out.
A total of seven architectures are officially supported for "trixie":
"trixie"
64-bit PC (amd64),
64-bit ARM (arm64),
ARM EABI (armel),
ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf),
64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el),
64-bit little-endian RISC-V (riscv64),
IBM System z (s390x)
I do wonder, where are PowerPC and IBM System z being used these days? Are there modern Linux systems being deployed with something other than amd64, arm64, and (soon?) riscv64?
I have used Debian starting sometime around slink. I still type "apt-get ..." and it still works reasonably well. There have definitely been hiccups in upgrades over the last 25+ years but the amount of time/effort dealing with those is almost nothing in comparison to other linux and non-OSS systems I've dealt with over the same span of time. My only regret is not contributing more to the community.
The thing I like most about Debian is that you need to know at least a little about what is going on to use it. For me, it does a good job of following "as simple as possible and no simpler."
As an owner of two i386 systems (both netbooks built around Intel's Atom N270), that run Debian, I am a little sad. I understand the reasoning, and I won't deny it is a very niche platform by now. But I had hoped Debian, with a history of supporting a wide range of platforms, would keep i386 going for a while longer.
Fortunately, bookworm will continue to receive updates for almost 3 years, so I am not in a hurry to look for a new OS for these relics. OpenBSD looks like the natural successor, but I am not sure if the wifi chips are supported. (And who knows how long these netbooks will continue to work, they were built in 2008 and 2009, so they've had a long life already.)
EDIT: Hooray, thanks to everyone who made this possible, is what I meant to say.
For those worrying about the NIC change with systemd, this comes from the release doc:
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....
# example:
udevadm test-builtin net_setup_link /sys/class/net/eno4 2>/dev/null
ID_NET_LINK_FILE=/usr/lib/systemd/network/99-default.link
ID_NET_LINK_FILE_DROPINS=
ID_NET_NAME=eno4 <-- note the NIC name that will happen after reboot
for x in $(cat /etc/network/interfaces | grep auto | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | grep -Ev 'lo|bond0'); do echo -n $x:; udevadm test-builtin net_setup_link /sys/class/net/$x 2>/dev/null | grep NET_NAME| cut -d = -f 2; done
So far I have not had an interface change due to upgrade, so I cannot say that the above does detect it.
I've been on Debian forever and love it to bits. But in an act which can only be described as batshit insanity, they have chosen to patch Python's pip3 in a manner which breaks the --prefix option. On Debian
pip3 install <whatever> --prefix=/usr/local
https://sources.debian.org/src/python3.7/3.7.3-2+deb10u3/deb...
Debian's signature feature (upgrade from stable to stable under 15 minutes) shines here too.
My first system migrated in less than 10 minutes, incl. package downloads and reboot. It's not a beast either. N100 mini PC connected to a ~50mbps network.
Lots of debian love in this thread and it's great to see. If you're so inclined I encourage you to donate to Debian. We're all better off the more support goes to an ecosystem and operation like Debian.
https://www.debian.org/donations
Not affiliated, just a happy user for a long, long time.
I have been using Debian Trixie for a few months in testing now, I can attest that its a great, stable operating system. Definitely better than Ubuntu in terms of user experience.
> "trixie" includes numerous updated software packages (over 63% of all packages from the previous release)
Wow, I'm amazed a third of packages haven't seen an update in, ehm checks
> After 2 years, 1 month, and 30 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version
I'm a fan of old software myself, in the sense that I find it cool to see F-Droid having a (usually tiny) package that is over 10 years old but it does exactly what I want with no bugs and it works perfectly on Android 10. I wonder if those 30% more commonly fall in the "it's fine as it is" category or in the "no maintainers available" category
> Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
What I did is switch to NetBSD.
The difference between Debian and Ubuntu is decreasing with each release recently. I was pleasantly surprised that Debian recognized all hardware components in my laptop released one year ago out of the box.
Hardware support is good and UI is great! It feels snappier than Ubuntu, may be due to lack of snap and fewer services and applications installed by default.
I just upgraded a mini pc with no real issues. Main steps were:
1.) sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get --yes upgrade && sudo apt-get --yes autoremove --purge
2.) Update all entries of bookworm to trixie in /etc/apt/sources.list.
3.) sudo apt full-upgrade
4.) sudo reboot
5.) sudo apt modernize-sourcesI love Debian and have a tremendous amount of respect for the people who work on the project. I no longer use Debian, but I think it's vitally important to have an anchor Linux distribution which isn't overly reliant on a for-profit entity and is truly community driven.
> The overall disk usage for trixie is 403,854,660 kB (403 GB)
What does this mean? If all 69k+ packages are installed, it will take up this much space?
I'm very sad to see them drop support for 32-bit, since that is the computer on which I have been using Debian for the past 10 years...
Does anyone have any suggestions for a 32-bit distro that's still being updated?
I've upgraded all my servers and laptops to Debian 13.
Lucky 13 and all... And not a single issue so far. Very happy!
Thanks to the Debian team for putting out yet another high quality, reliable release :)
If you're upgrading, see https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/upgradi....
Looking forward to 13! Debian 12 in combination with Pipewire is my go to daily use professional audio workstation for 2 years. Coming from Windows, there are no more forced updates anymore preventing me from doing my job. This is a releave. It works so good! Linux for professional audio is really an option now! Most high-end converters are connected via MADI or ADAT anyway, so there is no driver problem existent. Drivers are a consumer grade discussion..
I've kind of been using Debian 13 for awhile now (I'm on Unstable) and for me what's impressive is how polished a default Debian installation is these days. With Gnome, you literally can run it as is, no config needed. It just works.
That being said, I like Flatpak, so I installed it (was super easy and Flathub provides instructions), and I added a few Gnome Shell extensions (a Dock so my wife can find apps when she occasionally uses my laptop).
Debian gives you a feeling of ownership of your computer in a way the corporate distros don't, but is still pretty user friendly (unlike Arch).
I'd definitely install Debian Stable on a grandparents' computer.
Maybe a niche concern, but SDL2 is still in Trixie. The sdl2-compat layer (translating SDL2 APIs to SDL3) is in testing, where SDL2 also exists side-by-side with it and is intended to be used to test and verify that SDL2 apps that use it are actually compatible.
Night-and-day decision-making process compared to Fedora and Arch, which both replaced SDL2 with sdl2-compat, broke a bunch of SDL2 apps because sdl2-compat isn't actually SDL2-compatible yet, and sent everyone to yell at the SDL team about it.
Debian 13 trixie includes numerous updated software packages (over 63% of all packages from the previous release)
I’m not familiar with the metric definition they use, but I’d be worried if close to 100% of the packages they included in bookworm hadn’t been updated in the roughly 2 years between releases.
I use Debian for most of my servers, so I’m sure there is a valid explanation of that phrase.
I'm too impatient to use a non-rolling release distro like Debian as my main OS, that, by my standards, already starts a new distro version with some outdated packages. I admire Debian though and it is my favorite server OS.
Kudos to the team.
My first contact with Linux was with Debian 2.1. Exactly with this distro CDs https://archive.org/details/linux-actual-06-2/LinuxActual_01...
To be honest, it was a miserable experience to install it on your main computer without anything else available to look for help in case of problems. It was also hard to really try it due to lack of drivers for current (at that moment) ADSL modems.
But here I am a crapload of years later, still loving it :-)
Ooo la la, GnuCash 5.10. I'm still on 4.4.
Can't find release notes though, help?
I've found the docs, but they're huge. I'll looking specifically for a list of differences between 4.4 and 5.10. (Or at least the biggest differences)
Maybe title should note that it has now been released? There has been many updates about Trixie in the past few months in preparation for today.
How soon can I update my raspberry pi 5 from Bookworm to Trixie? Does PiOS have to initiate that first?
Debian was often the only linux os that worked on old "spacestations" of mine. Great sentiment
Looking forward to upgrade over the weekend.
Have had my RPi on Debian since Debian 9, with smooth upgrades every time.
I've been using the Debian trixie branch for about a year now on my local server, never once had a real issue with anything. Very impressive.
Apparently Trixie needs a larger boot petition than prior versions and therefore I have to do new installs on three of my homelab machines - and probably my proxmox machine too. What a headache.
I have been tracking Trixie on my Resolve workstation for the past couple of months. The only hiccup was that the latest kernel did not support the ondemand governor, so I had to build a custom kernel to fix that.
Nice, more chaos to unstable again. Sincerely happy because of the release and new stable, but also selfishly happy because now unstable starts moving again.
> The overall disk usage for trixie is 403,854,660 kB (403 GB), and is made up of 1,463,291,186 lines of code.
This makes Debian Trixie about 32 times larger than Windows XP with approximately 45 millions lines of code, arguably the best Windows OS ever.
Debian Trixie is released about 24 years after Windows XP.
> The overall disk usage for trixie is 403,854,660 kB (403 GB)
That's too big. I'm going to need a smaller distro.
Io i
Congrats to the Debian team!
The Devuan version may end up being the last that GNOME will run on...
So what is the actual difference. These release notes are not very clear. They just give version bumps. How can people get excited when you give them nothing to get excited about?
Writing this from my Debian system, it's a great distro that has been excellent to me as a daily driver. I switched to Debian 6 after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.
I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology, how it's a distro of free software by default but it also makes it easy to install non-free software or firmware blobs. I like Debian's package guidelines, I like dpkg, I like the Debian documentation even if Arch remains the best on that front. I like the stable/testing package streams, which make it easy to choose old but rock-stable vs just a bit old and almost as stable.
And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way. Every case I've had of Debian being outright unbootable or having other serious problems, it's been due to me trying to add things from third-party repositories, or messing up the configuration or something else, but not a fault of the Debian system itself.