Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie
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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 While some of the versions lag a bit behind the upstream, they are not woefully outdated.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.
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