Debian 13 “Trixie”

https://www.debian.org/News/2025/20250809

by ducktective • 12 months ago

974 391 12 months ago

gorgoiler• 12 months ago

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

Paianni6• 12 months ago

The Devuan version may end up being the last that GNOME will run on...

UncleSlacky3• 12 months ago

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Paianni6• 12 months ago

I don't like GNOME's engineering or license, but as far as the UI and design are concerned I don't think anyone has topped it (minus the hot corner I guess).

superkuh3• 12 months ago

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.

b11211• 12 months ago

Also watch out for surprise file deletes in /tmp and /var/tmp at 10 and 30 days.

This too can be turned off.

KORraN• 12 months ago

Isn't this the feature of /tmp? I set my default download location in Firefox to /tmp exactly for this reason, so that all the junk gets automatically removed after some time. Also, whenever I need a temporary Python script or test a package, I create a venv under /tmp.

sgarland4• 12 months ago

I can’t fathom why anyone would be surprised that a directory named “tmp” is ephemeral.

bryanlarsen• 12 months ago

Infinite scroll length on terminals can chew through /tmp, and systems misbehave strangely when they're out of /tmp.

spauldo6• 12 months ago

What terminal emulators default to infinite backscrolling? Genuinely curious here. I've used xterm with a scroll buffer of 512 lines for three decades now and outside of large builds I can't imagine wanting more than that.

bayindirh13• 12 months ago

This was discussed a ton in debian-devel. First, the tmpfs doesn't take much space already, and /tmp became a folder where persistence should not be expected over the years.

The problem with /tmp was many people and apps used it as an inter-user communication medium and expected persistency there, so it created both security problems and wasted disk space over time.

Since not many packaged apps used the /tmp like that and used the folder the way it should be used, the change was made.

I'm running Debian testing on one of my systems, and the change created no ill effects whatsoever. Not eating SSD write cycles can be considered a plus, even.

However, as I also noted in the relevant thread, the approach might have a couple of downsides in some scenarios.

If you have the time and the desire, discussion starts at https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/05/msg00014.html

3eb7988a16632• 12 months ago

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.

cocoto2• 12 months ago

I think the title has been trimmed from the word “realeased”. Might be another case of HN auto title edit botching the original title.

hiprob• 12 months ago

I can't believe we've come to such a high number, and a particularly lucky one at that

Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.

cocoto2• 12 months ago

The installation is slightly easier (but still hard because of USB install) and the website has a more appealing design. Except from that what is better in Ubuntu for the average casual user? Proprietary blobs are now included in the default installer since version 12.

amtamt• 12 months ago

Two kids in 4 to 16 range, and two adults in 30 to 46 age ranges have been using Debian on daily basis for almost a decade now. At least three of them are pretty "average home user". There has been forced use of windows (since school and employers wanted), but for home use Debian has always been better due to less maintenance needs and no distractions.

accrual5• 12 months ago

Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user

I think that's fine for Debian. Maybe even a good thing.

Debian supplies a rock solid base for many general purpose tasks. Ubuntu and other distros are free to package that up in a user friendly way, but as a technical user I want to be able to go upstream and get a basic Linux system without extra stuff.

josteink2• 12 months ago

Don't feed the troll, etc... But I just had to bite on this bit:

Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be. It is unfortunate that Ubuntu has to reign supreme in that regard.

It's true that Ubuntu used to be the OOB ready version of Debian, which "just worked", while base Debian took look of fiddling to even have wifi working.

These day though I find the opposite to be true: Ubuntu does lots of weird things I don't want, and I have to "fiddle" to disable all that. A base Debian install however (ISO with firmware bundled), just works.

For me, Ubuntu is officially off my list of distros I bother spending my time on.

prmoustache2• 12 months ago

You can install debian and ubuntu with same DE and you'd be hard pressed to find a difference apart from the theme unless you are a power user who knows what snap is.

In fact, Ubuntu has never been an especially user friendly distro. At the beginning it was just a debian that was installed with debian's experimental installer before they decided to use it in stable. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you wanted to find a distro that was making efforts towards beginners looking for Gui config tools, you had to look at Suse and Mandrake (now Mandriva).

The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free at a time when not everybody had fast internet connections and would look for paper magazine to come with CD/DVD. And they have stopped doing that a loooooong time ago.

simion3142• 12 months ago

The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free

Assuming you are not malicious I will kindly help with your bad memory, Ubuntu had always very good proprietary driver support, this made laptops actually work and helped beginners. I also remember they had a graphical installer compared to Debian and for sure this was beginners friendly. Maybe some other distro offered easy way to install and come with proprietary drivers setup but I can't remember a deb based distro doing that.

Anyway you were wrong, the CDs were not the only thing made Ubuntu appeal for beginners, there were Linux magazines with CDs each month and they were not super expensive , my first linux was a Kubuntu 6.10 from a magazine and I am still running Kubuntu today though i ran Debian, Sidux, Arch, Mandriva, SUSE in the past when I had time to try different distros, compile custom kernels etc.

nelgaard• 11 months ago

Or unless the capacity of you harddisk is limited, filling up with huge snap packages.

Or you need something that is broken by snap. I helped a user after thunderbird after an upgrade could no longer open PDF-s in okular. It turned out that the thunderbird dpkg had been replaced with a snap and I spent quite some time trying getting it to work, filed bug reports, etc, before giving up and installing from Mozilla until I replace it all with Debian.

foresto6• 12 months ago

Alas it's still not suitable as a daily driver for the average home user and probably never will be.

Why not?

My family members need little more than a web browser, media player, and office suite. Debian Stable is very suitable here; arguably more so than other distros, which tend to require maintenance more often.

juliangmp• 11 months ago

Im curious as to what you define as the average home user. Because from my perspective, Debian is the ideal OS for most of them (e.g. my dad)

josteink2• 12 months ago

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 :)

b11211• 12 months ago

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-"

There is a weird depends you cannot get around without simultaneously removing and installing in parallel. A Debian bug highlighted the above, with a "-" for systemd-sysv- systemd- as a fix, along with allow remove essential.

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: -1

egorfine• 12 months ago

Wait, sysvinit on debian 13 truly practically works?? as in, one can remove systemd and have a working server OS with sysv init??

b11211• 12 months ago

Yes.

I run a full desktop too, without it. Multiple variants.

I don't use gnome's Desktop Environment though (although I do run gtk/gnome software), so cannot comment on that.

UncleSlacky3• 12 months ago

Yes, MX Linux will be doing this (as a separate ISO, until now they're been able to provide a single ISO that lets you choose between systemd and sysvinit at every boot):

https://mxlinux.org/blog/changes-coming-with-mx-25/

foresto6• 12 months ago

Thank you for sharing this. I'm inclined to adopt it in my lxc containers, at least.

RVuRnvbM2e• 12 months ago

Why would you want to do this?

dijit• 12 months ago

choice.

zahlman5• 12 months ago

To avoid systemd, presumably. Although one could also just switch to Devuan at that point.

dur-randir2• 12 months ago

I've been living with sysvinit up until Debian 11. Then it became unusable with lxc containers :(, so I had to bite the bullet. But for the basic system it indeed works.

JdeBP3• 12 months ago

I can credit you, in version 1.42, with more than a hyperlink to random posts on Hacker News if you have something better elsewhere on the WWW. (-:

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/services/systemd-login...

accrual5• 12 months ago

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.

zozbot2345• 12 months ago

Hopefully i386 (or perhaps a new i386-like port with added support for 64-bit time values) can move to the unofficial Debian Ports infrastructure for Debian 14 (forky) or Debian 15 (duke). Debian Ports has a m68k port, so supporting one for i386 shouldn't be a huge problem.

3eb7988a16632• 12 months ago

To what end? Outside of sheer nostalgia if you are running ancient hardware, you probably have a bespoke application which requires that environment. Either you cannot change for hard technical, compliance, or just fear of the unknown. Firewall it from the internet and continue to run whatever release last worked.

I am not happy about unnecessary ewaste, but an i386 almost certainly has and order of magnitude less horsepower than a raspberry pi or N100.

munchlax• 12 months ago

It still exists but without any official iso or installer.

If that's all there's to it, you can still use debootstrap, compile a kernel, and point the root parameter to your shiny new install.

If the official i386 arch was built with instructions that your hardware doesn't support, tough cookies.

tremon5• 12 months ago

The i386 architecture hasn't been dropped, it is still available in the archives to support 32-bit applications. The major change is that there no longer is a 32-bit kernel in the archive (the package linux-image-686 is no more). But most packages are still available in their i386 versions:

  $ curl -s http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz | zgrep ^Package: | wc -l
  68737
  $ curl -s http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz | zgrep ^Package: | wc -l
  66958

pabs311• 12 months ago

In case anyone wants to do that, here is the doc for new ports:

https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New

NewJazz3• 12 months ago

Well, isn't there an additional year or so of support for old stable? So beyond 2025.

abhinavk2• 12 months ago

Buster is supported until June 2028.

badsectoracula• 12 months ago

AFAICT this refers to Debian support, the Linux kernel does support 32bit CPUs though only since the original Pentium (excluding some clones).

matja• 11 months ago

The latest kernel as of today still supports the 486SX ! (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v6.17-rc1/arch/x86/Kc...)

esaym• 12 months ago

Are you confusing "386" with 32bit? 686 is the normal 32bit arch. 386 is something from the 1980's right?

NewJazz3• 12 months ago

AIUI Debian kept the i386 name for the arch even as their 32 bit requirements evolved.

bowsamic• 12 months ago

i386 is the most common term used for 32 bit x86 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-32

accrual5• 12 months ago

When distros mention i386 support they often actually refer to i586 or i686, yes.

True i386 support would mean compatible with the original Intel 386 processor from 1985. The 486 added a few additional instructions in 1989 but things really changed with the Pentium in 1993 - that gave us i586 which is the bare minimum for most modern software today. Much software can still run on regular Pentiums today if compiled for it, but SSE2 optimizations requires at least a Pentium 4 or Core CPUs instead.

I play with retro PCs often and found OpenBSD's i386 target stopped supporting real 386 CPUs after the 4.1 release, and dropped support for i486 somewhat recently in 6.8. It now requires at least a Pentium class CPU, i586, though the arch is still referred to as i386 likely because it's a common proxy for "32-bit".

spauldo6• 12 months ago

Linux ran fine on 386 chips - that was actually what it was originally developed on. But Intel added a bunch of functionality in the 486, Pentium, and Pentium Pro chips. At some point the powers that be didn't see any value in continuing to support pre-P6 chips anymore.

It was a bit of a strange decision since there were undoubtedly more 386, 486, and Pentium users than some of the platforms Linux continued to support, but that's the choice they made. But they weren't alone. Even NetBSD requires a 486DX or better.

winrid• 12 months ago

Man, I thought I was behind using a P3 in like 2007 lol. You can get something 100x faster for $1 :D

avhon12• 12 months ago

Debian (and many other distributors of compiled binaries) uses "i386" to refer to all 32-bit x86 processors, including the Pentium 3.

accrual5• 12 months ago

Hahah yeah, it's just a for fun/hobby PC. It's pretty beefy for what it is - 1.3GHz, 512MB RAM, 512GB SSD on a SATA card, fast AGP card. I can run a Debian desktop at 1080p on here.

spauldo6• 12 months ago

OpenBSD requires at least a Pentium these days.

accrual5• 12 months ago

Yep! I did some testing and found 6.8 was the final version to support 486 CPUs. The reason is the OpenBSD project switched to clang for the compiler in 6.9, and in the process became dependent on Pentium instructions.

However, that doesn't stop one from installing a Pentium Overdrive in an old Socket 3 board and running the latest release. ;)

potato-peeler• 12 months ago

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?

toenail• 12 months ago

As this also lists lines of code, it sounds more like sources plus packages. Think space that a full mirror (src + generic + arch specific packages) would need.

tremon5• 12 months ago

Indeed, this is the amount of space that a Debian mirror would need to host all Trixie packages. So it's the compressed packages total size, not the space it would take to have all packages installed simultaneously (which also happens to be impossible, because of package conflicts/alternatives and Debian supporting 7+ different architectures).

ethan_smith• 12 months ago

The 403GB figure represents the total size of all source packages in the Debian archive, not the disk space required for a typical installation which is usually under 10GB for a desktop system.

ACS_Solver5• 12 months ago

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.

zvmaz• 12 months ago

after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to regret it.

In what way Ubuntu went downhill?

happymellon2• 12 months ago

Snaps? Proprietary package managers are never great.

yjftsjthsd-h6• 12 months ago

Snaps, and ads in the motd

Eduard• 12 months ago

all the weird proprietary Canonical stuff they try to put into vanilla Debian and have it replace common stuff.

snap, lxd (not lxc!), mir, upstart, ufw.

It's neverending, and it's always failing.

nextos• 12 months ago

IMHO, it also became too complex, with too many things installed by default and too much upstream patching.

This made it more fragile. It was really nice in the late 2000s, but gradually became worse.

kev0092• 12 months ago

The alternative question to ask is: in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian?

In the early days it had a differing and usually better aligned release schedule for the critical graphics stack.

As a function of time, you are increasingly likely to get rug pulled once Shuttleworth decides to collect his next ransom.

doublepg23• 12 months ago

I forget the exact context but I recall an Ubuntu dev stating they have more users of the Firefox snap alone than trendy distros have entire users.

I think it’s worth keeping that in mind with all the hate Ubuntu gets. Most users are just silently getting their work done on an LTS they update every two years.

ACS_Solver5• 12 months ago

For me, it was a combination of Ubuntu breaking upstream and introducing its own unnecessary systems.

I had a few issues caused by Ubuntu that weren't upstream. One was Tracker somehow eating up lots of CPU power and slowing the system down. Another was with input methods, I need to type in a pretty rare language and that was just broken on Ubuntu one day. Not upstream.

The bigger problem was Ubuntu adding stuff before it was ready. The Unity desktop, which is now fine, was initially missing lots of basic features and wasn't a good experience. Then there was the short-lived but pretty disastrous attempt to replace Xorg with Mir.

My non-tech parents are still on Ubuntu, have been for some twenty years, and it's mostly fine there. I wouldn't recommend it if you know your way around a Linux system but for non-tech, Ubuntu works well. Still, just a few months ago I was astonished by another Ubuntu change. My mom's most important program is Thunderbird, with her long-running email archive. The Thunderbird profile has effortlessly moved across several PCs as it's just a copy of the folder. Suddenly, Ubuntu migrated to the snap version of Thunderbird, so after a software update she found herself with a new version and an empty profile. Because of course the new profile is somewhere under ~/snap and the update didn't in any way try to link to the old profile.

Then there were stupid things like Amazon search results in the Unity dash search when looking for your files or programs. Nah. Ubuntu isn't terrible by any means but for a number of years now, I'd recommend Linux Mint as the friendly Debian derivative.

28304283409234• 12 months ago

Oh....snap.

ocdtrekkie• 12 months ago

Minutes to start Firefox on one of my machines.

spauldo6• 12 months ago

I'm an old-school user so I'm not exactly Ubuntu's target audience, but for Ubuntu was bad about a lot of the older, lesser-used bits of Linux.

The two things I can remember were problems with NFS out of the box (outside having to install nfs-common, which I'm fine with) and apt-cache not displaying descriptions of packages. There were lots of other, minor annoyances that affected people like me but wouldn't affect someone who got into Linux desktops after, say, 2010. My memory sucks though so those are the two I remember. Yes, there were bug reports filed and yes, they sat in the tracker for years with no attention from Ubuntu.

I wound up back on Debian once I got old enough that I didn't care about being behind the times a couple years.

tmtvl• 12 months ago

Amazon ads in the Unity application menu (what was it called, 'lenses' or something?).

ThatMedicIsASpy• 12 months ago

I've been always a Fedora person, still am. But my PC moved to Proxmox (debian) in 2023. Now a Fedora Atomic sits in a VM running flatpaks and podman containers :D

madars2• 12 months ago

I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.

Debian is great but I can't say this is a shared experience. In particular, I've been bitten by Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable (specifically, backport regressions in the fast-moving DRM subsystem leading to hard-to-debug crashes), despite Debian releases technically having the "same" kernel for a duration of a release. In contrast, Ubuntu just uses newer kernels and -hwe avoids a lot of patch friction. So I still use Debian VMs but Ubuntu on bare metal. I haven't tried kernel from debian-backports repos though.

bayindirh13• 12 months ago

Which GPU, display server and compositor stack are you using?

brirec• 12 months ago

These days all of my “Debian” bare metal systems are technically running Proxmox, which I think is a relatively happy medium as far as the base Debian system goes — the Proxmox kernel is basically the Ubuntu kernel, but otherwise it’s a pretty standard Debian system.

I’ve thought about (ab)using a Proxmox repository on an otherwise stock Debian system before just for the kernel…

kasabali9• 12 months ago

Debian's heavy patching of kernel in Debian stable

Needs citation.

Debian stable uses upstream LTS kernels and I'm not aware of any heavy patching they do on top of that.

Upstream -stable trees are very relaxed in patches they accept and unfortunately they don't get serious testing before being released either (you can see there's a new release in every -stable tree like every week), so that's probably what you've been bit by.

seba_dos12• 12 months ago

The upstream kernel already backports enough regressions on its own to its stable releases, Debian's kernel team does not help them too much with that.

djfobbz• 12 months ago

Yeah, I ditched Ubuntu Server after too many upgrade headaches. I manage 75+ VPS instances for app hosting, and it's nerve-wracking doing maintenance updates knowing there's a chance one won't boot after. That's easily an extra 1-2 hours per VPS just to get it back. Switched to Debian back in the 8.x days in 2015 and it's been smooth sailing. Never had it break unless I was the one who messed it up.

9cb14c1ec0• 12 months ago

Me too. All the server software (postgres, caddy, bun, etc) I'm using runs just fine on Debian, and I never have had updates break something on my Debian servers.

foresto6• 12 months ago

I like dpkg, I like the Debian documentation even if Arch remains the best on that front.

That's curious, because when I was learning to make Debian packages, I found the official documentation to be far better than I had seen from any other distro. The Policy Manual in particular is very detailed, continually improving, and even documents incremental changes from each version to the next. (That last bit makes it easy for package maintainers to keep up with current best practices.)

Does Arch have something better in this department?

Are you perhaps comparing the Arch wiki to Debian's wiki? On that front I would agree with you.

rbanffy3• 12 months ago

The only thing I can say against Debian is that it tends to start new server software immediately after install, before I have a chance to configure it properly. Defaults are sane for most packages, but, still, it scares me a little. In that I like the Red Hat approach of installing and leaving it off until I decide to turn it on.

JackeJR• 12 months ago

Just have sane firewall rules and you are good. E.g. if I install openssh-server and it auto starts, it doesn't make it out of my machine because my nftables does not allow inbound on port 22. It's just knowing the default behaviour and adjusting your practices for it.

Linux-Fan2• 12 months ago

It is a well-known issue with probably less well-known solutions, cf. <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/723675/debian-ubunt...>

  echo exit 101 > /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
  chmod +x /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d

I think this is the recommended way to avoid autostarting services on Debian.

heresie-dabord• 12 months ago

Debian is my foundation. I keep servers on Old Stable and test new release features on an ephemeral system.

I learned nftables with Bookworm and labwc with Trixie.

labwc supports Wayland with Openbox configuration.

jraph3• 12 months ago

Why do you remain on old stable instead of stable?

umvi• 12 months ago

Do you usually update in place or do a fresh install whenever a new major version comes out?

madphilosopher• 12 months ago

I always update in place. And I follow all the upgrade procedure advice in the release notes.

jlarocco• 12 months ago

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.

You're not trying hard enough ;-)

I have Debian on an old MacBook Pro and had it on an even older iMac, and I've had a few problems over the years. Always with proprietary drivers - WiFi, graphics, webcams, etc. - Apple really don't want people using free software on their hardware. There's always been a fix, but there have been a few stressful moments and hoops to jump through.

But it's definitely my favorite distro, and I run it everywhere I can. Pretty much always "just works" anywhere but Apple.

MrDarcy• 12 months ago

I’m not trying hard enough. Feel the same as you and GP for two decades and counting.

Galanwe• 12 months ago

You don't mention say what you like specifically about Debian, most of what you wrote could be said for a lot of distributions.

So here is what I _don't_ like about Debian :-)

- I don't like Debian package tooling (dpkg, debootstrap, de build...). Actually I hate everything about the experience of Debian packaging. Every time I package for Debian, I end up with a messed up setup of chroots and have to make triple sure nothing leaked from my environment.

- Debian has a habit of repackaging everything at their own sauce, disregarding upstream philosophy. Debian packages will have their own microcosm of configuration directories, defaults, paths, etc. orthogonal to what a pristine installation look like.

- Debian has the annoying habit of default starting installed services. So you always have to dance around your configuration management to disable services, install them, configure them, then restart them.

exe34• 12 months ago

I think this is all true, but the "being my fault" part has gotten better for me with nixos. Broke it? just reboot into the previous version and get configuration.nix back from git. I had to reinstall exactly once in 2016 shortly after the first install, but I don't know what I did wrong. the third time I installed nixos was last week when I bought a new computer that came with Windows.

throwaway81523• 12 months ago

You weren't around for when they broke the OpenSSL random number generator for no good reason. That was back in 2008 and it created vulnerabilities that persist to this day. https://16years.secvuln.info/

I still use Debian but it's hard to forget stuff like that even after all these years.

dotancohen• 12 months ago

Though I agree with you, if that's the bar you're setting then Debian comes out far ahead of any other OS that I've ever used - Linux based or not. I can recall dozens of worse Windows bugs, most of which did not even affect me because I was not using Windows at the time. Mac has its share too.

jraph3• 12 months ago

What do you expect Debian to do today about this 17 years old incident?

StopDisinfo9104• 12 months ago

I like Debian's measured pragmatism with ideology

There is plenty that could be said of Debian but as far as I’m concerned that’s not part of it.

Debian patches software for purely ideological reasons because they think they are not free enough. That’s not pragmatism. That’s the reverse of pragmatism. It certainly is a real drag on the teams developing the software they try to ship.

KronisLV• 12 months ago

And one of the best parts is, I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-updates-are-broken

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-and-grub-are-broken

Then again, I’ve had most software occasionally break, I’m thankful that Debian exists.

gradschool• 12 months ago

I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.

My experience has been contrary to that. I'm a Linux user of 25+ years with various distros but about half of that time with Debian as my main desktop. I broke up with Debian about ten years ago thinking we could still be friends, but every time I've tried to put it on a new box it since then something weird has happened, most recently about a month ago on a completely new Intel N150, when it gave me some stick about video modes. Today my laptop got hosed by an attempted upgrade from bookworm to trixie, as in tons of error messages and then no more docker and no more virtualbox. No harm done because Debian taught me long ago to store a copy of the whole root filesystem on external media before an upgrade, but now the clock is ticking until I have to migrate off it or get stuck with something too old to be compatible with anything.

master_crab• 12 months ago

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.

baobun3• 12 months ago

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.

Code doesn't "go bad" and not everything is affected by ecosystem churn and CVEs.

An established package not having updates for 2y is not in and of itself problematic.

b11211• 12 months ago

I don't know why you think it would be different. Are you concerned about security updates? That's not part of the metric, as far as I can see.

And even if it was?

If you look at the number of packages in Debian, only a small portion have CVEs. There are nearly 30k package sources, and an output of 60k binary packages.

Yet we only get a few security updates weekly.

Another example? Both trixie and bookworm use the same firefox ESR (extended release) version. Both will get updated when firefox forces everyone to the next ESR.

Beyond that, some packages are docs. Some are 'glue' packages, eg scripts to manage Debian. These may not change between releases.

Lastly, Debian actually maintains an enormous number of upstream orphaned packages. In those cases, the version number is the same (sometimes), but with security updates slapped on if required.

From my perspective, outside of timely and quick security updates, I have zero desire for a lot of churn. Why would I? Churn means work. Churn means changed stability.

We get plenty of fun and churn from kernel, and driver related changes (X, Wayland, audio/nic, etc), and desktop apps. And of course from anything running forward, with scissors, like network connected joy.

duskwuff4• 12 months ago

It's not uncommon for small software packages to go years between updates - either because they're a simple utility that's feature-complete and rarely needs bug fixes, or because they're data files (e.g. packages of icons or fonts) which might not need to change at all.

AstroBen2• 12 months ago

Debian stable is just that - unchanging between major Debian versions. They do however push security updates when necessary, so you're not missing out on those

hsbauauvhabzb3• 12 months ago

Any chance you know how they manage that? Surely not every package in the repos is supported for the entire 2 year cycle, so if a vuln comes out after a major refactor, it’s surely not easy to backport the patch.

aragilar2• 12 months ago

If upstream makes no releases in that time, then there'll be no upgrades.

binwiederhier• 12 months ago

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...

heywire• 12 months ago

Just wanted to say thanks for ntfy! I use it daily to notify me on events from my home Meshtastic node.

tremon5• 12 months ago

The maintainer has a short explanation here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1098866#10

The webapp is a nodejs app that requires packages that are not currently in debian.

Since vendoring dependencies inside packages is frowned upon in Debian, the maintainer would have needed to add those packages themselves and maintain them. My guess is that they didn't want to take on that effort.

winter_blue• 12 months ago

but several features in ntfy won't be available through debian packaging due to missing golang and nodejs packages

Woah. Shouldn’t Node and Golang be in Debian’s official repos by now?

baobun3• 12 months ago

On the web part:

Debian sources need to be sufficient to build. So for npm projects, you usually have a debian-specific package.json where each npm dependency (transitively, including devDependencies needed for build) needs to either be replaced with its equivalent debian package (which may also need to be ported), vendored (usually less ideal, especially for third-party code), or removed. Oh, and enjoy aligning versions for all of that. That's doable but non-trivial work with such a sizable lockfile. If I would guess the maintainer couldn't justify the extra effort and taking on combing through all those packages.

I also think in either case the Debian way would probably be to split it out as a complementary ntfy-web package.

esseph• 12 months ago

It might be a better idea to release this as a container (if it isn't already) to take care of the dependencies.

yjftsjthsd-h6• 12 months ago

https://docs.ntfy.sh/install/#docker

The ntfy image is available for amd64, armv6, armv7 and arm64. It should be pretty straight forward to use.

leansensei• 12 months ago

Thank you for ntfy, it's such a useful piece of software!

scbrg• 12 months ago

ntfy is a very useful tool. Thank you very much for making it and also for maintaining the ntfy.sh service for those of us too lazy to self host.

StopDisinfo9104• 12 months ago

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).

My advise to you is to deny all support from people using the Debian version of your software and automatically close all bug tickets from Debian saying you don’t support externally patched software.

You would be far from the first to do so and it’s a completely rational and sane decision. You don’t have to engage with the insanity that Debian own policies force on its maintainers and users.

jraph3• 12 months ago

I agree that maintainers should not be expected to support patched versions of their software, but as a user I like the Debian policies you call insane. I would actually pick Debian exactly because they are cautious with the dependencies.

Venn1• 12 months ago

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.

sheerun2• 12 months ago

Debian was often the only linux os that worked on old "spacestations" of mine. Great sentiment

sheerun2• 12 months ago

And I mean Debian 12, not some old version, much more impressive

spauldo6• 12 months ago

Do you mean SparcStations?

gcarvalho• 12 months ago

Looking forward to upgrade over the weekend.

Have had my RPi on Debian since Debian 9, with smooth upgrades every time.

imoverclocked• 12 months ago

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."

Nursie2• 12 months ago

Which one was slink?

My first Debian install was in 1996. I had no real idea what I was doing, but it was amazing to me that I could remote-display windows from machines across campus, and it was alien compared to the windows 3.x/95 I was used to at that point. There was no apt at that point, or none that I was aware of, and adding new stuff was painful.

I started using debian preferentially as my workstation/desktop OS in about 2005, and was installing it on embedded systems (linksys nslu2) to make micro servers by … etch I think it was.

By 2008 I was at IBM and they allowed a choice of windows or redhat on your laptop, and if you were adventurous there was experimental support for Ubuntu which might work on Debian. I made it work and discovered that among 330k people there were 22 of us running it!

Always loved it, it always just made more sense than other distros somehow. My daily driver is a Mac now, but I still have a few Debian machines around.

markus_zhang• 12 months ago

When can we have Bandit or Bluey?

Balinares• 12 months ago

Presumably not before Debian runs out of Toy Story characters.

seba_dos12• 12 months ago

...and since there's Toy Story 5 scheduled for 2026, the pool of yet unused characters will become larger again soon.

juujian• 12 months ago

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.

lucb1e2• 12 months ago

The only complaint on a fresh install is that Cinnamon seems to use a ton of CPU when there's a little moving thingy anywhere on the screen (a browser tab that has a loading icon in the tab list is sufficient). This is most noticeable when you have a VM without graphics acceleration (don't ask why in the world my job requires that). Graphics without acceleration is always heavy, but this is an extra process doing whatever on top of the actual load

Then my private laptop has had a bunch of graphic issues after upgrading to 13 (it manifests differently in a lot of applications and it changes when you pick a different desktop theme, not even sure how to describe it). The new pipewire (pulseaudio replacement, idk why that needed replacing) does not work properly when the CPU is busy (so I currently play games without game sounds or music in the background). The latter then also sometimes (1 in 5 times maybe?) crashes when resuming from suspend, but instead of dying, spams systemd which diligently stores it all in a shitty binary file (that you can't selectively prune), runs completely out of disk space, and breaks various things on the rest of the system until you restart the pipewire process and purge any and all logs (remember, no selective pruning)... Tried various things I found in web searches and threw an LLM at it as well, but no dice. I assume these issues are from it not being a fresh install, so no blame/complaint here really, just annoying and I haven't had these issues when doing previous upgrades. Not yet sure how to resolve, perhaps I'll end up doing a completely new install and seeing what configs I can port until issues start showing up

Surely these things are not a Debian-specific issue, but I haven't noticed something like that with either 11 or 12

Edit: oh yeah, and the /tmp(fs) counter is at 1 so far. I wonder how many times I'll have run out of RAM by Debian 14, by forgetting I can't just dump temporary files into /tmp anymore without estimating the size correctly beforehand

esperent• 12 months ago

I've been testing Cinnamon on my Ubuntu machine recently. I was close to deciding to switch from Gnome but I keep running into an issue whenever I have long running tasks in Blender.

In Gnome, Blender becomes unresponsive but everything else is still usuable. In Cinnamon, the entire system becomes unresponsive.

b11211• 12 months ago

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

Here's a one-liner, excluding a bond interface and lo. Gives a nice list of pre and post change.

  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

The doc's logic is that after you've upgraded to trixie, and before reboot, you're running enough of systemd to see what it will name interfaces after reboot.

So far I have not had an interface change due to upgrade, so I cannot say that the above does detect it.

foresto6• 12 months ago

Do you happen to know if this change can affect people who have disabled systemd's Predictable* Network Interface Names before upgrading to Trixie?

*haha

champtar3• 12 months ago

You can easily keep the current naming behavior with the 'net.naming_scheme=' kargs

champtar3• 12 months ago

Hopefully the last breaking change.

enoX should always stay stable, as it's the BIOS (in some ACPI table) telling that this device/port has this ID.

ensX means the NIC in PCIe slot X, but in your PCIe tree you can have PCIe bridges, so technically you could have multiple NIC in the same slot (what the BIOS declare as a slot), so there was a lot of breaking NIC naming changes over the years in systemd to figure out the right heuristics that are safe, enabling/disabling slot naming if there is a PCIe bridge, but just in some cases.

Also for historical reasons the PCIe slot number was read indirectly leading to some conflicts in some cases (this was fixed in systemd 257)

dur-randir2• 12 months ago

Hopefully the last breaking change.

Every year's cope with systemd.

bayindirh13• 12 months ago

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.

mr_sturd• 12 months ago

What was the process for this? Does it involve manually modifying the sources.lists files, or is there a single command to instigate the upgrade?

bayindirh13• 12 months ago

There are two main ways:

If your sources file references the release name (e.g.:bookworm), you change them to trixie, then “apt update && apt dist-upgrade”.

or,

If your sources file directly reference distro-suites (e.g.: stable), you just “apt update && apt dist-upgrade” since stable is now pointing to trixie.

In the first reboot, you run “apt autopurge” to remove packages which are not needed anymore.

…and you’re done.

account426• 12 months ago

Is this really a signature feature when rolling release distros are common?

bayindirh13• 12 months ago

Yes, esp. if you are using Debian at infra and in production. I upgraded three servers in the morning while sipping my tea. Nobody noticed anything.

For RedHat family, this is nigh impossible, requiring hours of planning, downtimes, etc., and even then, it's not guaranteed to work.

If you prefer a rolling release, and won't use it on a server, Debian Testing got you covered (unless you are in a security sensitive environment). My systems are well-isolated from outside, so desktop systems can run Testing without issues.

Servers and exposed systems always run stable with security updates installed automatically, though.

Pet_Ant2• 12 months ago

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...

duskwuff4• 12 months ago

Note that you probably don't need the DVD ("full") image. Most users should use the "minimal" netinstall CD and download packages at install time.

synack• 12 months ago

Agreed, but for laptops it’s nice to keep a copy of the DVD iso on disk and in your apt sources so that you can install stuff offline.

Pet_Ant2• 12 months ago

I downloaded both because I intend to seed, but yes, if you have a fast internet connection then minimal is perfect... but if you are on a crappy third-world connection where it might take all day to get the image, it's nice to have it all in place when you are ready to install.

wltr2• 12 months ago

It baffles me I keep searching for these files every time I want to download Debian. And it’s been like that for over a decade at least.

pabs311• 12 months ago

They are linked from the "Other downloads" page linked from the front page.

yonatan8070• 12 months ago

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)

It's good to see RISC-V becoming a first-class citizen, despite the general lack of hardware using it at the moment.

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?

kev0092• 12 months ago

Both Power and z are many billion dollar businesses each. Banking and other high finance is the stronghold for both. IBM still seems proud of z, Power seems merely tolerated these days which is a shame because it is a nice ISA and the systems are very nice too.

Palomides• 12 months ago

IBM puts a lot of work and money into making sure open source stuff runs properly on those two, even if they aren't that popular

them being kept by major distros is therefore not as "natural" as other architectures

pabs311• 12 months ago

For Debian s390x (IBM Z), they only employ two people to work on the port, which isn't really enough. I think ppc64el has even less people.

ndiddy• 12 months ago

Mainframes are still holding on in use cases where a single server having continuous uptime is vital. They're designed to have uptime measured in decades, so even components like the processors and main memory have hot spares available and can be hot-swapped without interrupting the OS or running services. They also have continually running system monitoring and diagnostics at the hardware level (not running as an OS service) that will alert both the owner and IBM if they detect some sort of hardware fault. IBM has supported Linux as a first-class OS option for their mainframes since the early 2000s.

From a developer perspective, s390x is also the last active big-endian architecture (I guess there's SPARC as well, but that's on life support and Oracle doesn't care about anyone running anything but Solaris on it), so it's useful for picking up endianness bugs.

Another interesting thing is that the only two 32-bit architectures left supported are armel and armhf. Debian has already announced that this will be the last release that supports armel (https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....), so I guess it'll be a matter of time before they drop 32-bit support altogether.

solatic• 12 months ago

Yeah, mainframes are all about cases where the uptime is critical. Most modern systems are good with offering 99.9% or 99.99% reliability, with the understanding that trying to offer more than that just gets more and more expensive. Well... spending huge amounts of money on mainframes is one of the strategies to get to reliability numbers like 99.9999999%.

Source: https://itic-corp.com/itic-2023-reliability-survey-ibm-z-res...

The legitimate usage is typically for workloads like relational databases (which are anyway single-machine architectures) that experience heavy load 24/7, part of fragile architectures that cannot tolerate downtime (remaining fragile as such because the original source code has been lost etc.), where "the system is down" causes tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people to stop work.

snvzz• 12 months ago

Very important to note the lack of x86 (32bit x86) support.

The end of an era.

Nursie2• 12 months ago

I do wonder, where are PowerPC and IBM System z being used these days?

IBM.

And they own redhat, so I imagine they put a lot of time and money into making the kernel work.

Why Debian in particular, not sure.

Narishma2• 12 months ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h6• 12 months ago

In the abstract I'm a big fan of supporting me old machines forever, but I have to ask out of curiosity - what hardware is practical to run these days and only has a 32-bit processor?

jabl• 12 months ago

I tried to repurpose an old laptop I had lying around as a "lie on the couch and surf the web or watch youtube" machine. It was one of the last 32-bit only cpus (pentium m), so I installed Debian bookworm (12) on it. Unfortunately it turned out it couldn't even play youtube videos at 144p without stuttering. So I E-wasted the machine.

I suppose as some kind of headless home server it could still have been useful. OTOH for something that runs 24/7 a RPi would use a fraction of the electricity and still be a lot more powerful.

So yes, beyond nostalgia and some embedded/industrial usecases, it's hard to see a use for a 32-bit only PC these days.

Linux-Fan2• 12 months ago

I have a few old PCs (towers) here which don't support amd64 mostly Pentium 4-based.

They all still have DVD reader drives and are nice for ripping CDs. Despite the fact that the drives are nearing 20 years of age (machines are from ~2005) they still perform better than most “new” external drives. Of course one could also move the drives to a newer machine but many of them use the IDE connector which is not commonly found on modern systems. Also, modern cases typically don't account for (multiple) 5.25" drives.

The other use case is to flash microcontrollers. When fiddeling around with electronics there is always a risk of a short circuit or other error that could in worst case kill the attached PC's mainboard. I feel much safer attaching my self-built electronics to an old machine than to my amd64 workstation.

Due to their age, I think the old machines may not live much longer -- I fear not even 10 more years, some of my old 32-bit laptops have already failed. Hence even for me it does not make sense to try keeping up the software support. Maybe I switch them to a BSD or other Linux distribution if they live long enough but for now the machines run OK with Debian Bookworm (newly oldstable), too.

Narishma2• 12 months ago

In my case I have a couple of first gen 32-bit Atom netbooks that I use regularly for the same things I've always used them for. The hardware still work just fine so I see no reason to replace them.

krylon4• 12 months ago

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.

dschuessler• 12 months ago

Out of curiosity, what do you use these netbooks for?

krylon4• 12 months ago

One sits in my bathroom so I can browse random Wikipedia articles while I'm, uh, busy. The other one sits on my nightstand and plays audiobooks/podcasts when I'm going to sleep.

So nothing critical. But something they are still good at, and being very small makes them a natural fit for these use cases.

homebrewer3• 12 months ago

Alpine supports i686, I see no current deprecation plans. This may change in the next three years though, who knows.

anthk2• 12 months ago

OpenBSD runs perfectly fine. Atom netbook, n270, 1GB of RAM, cwm+git dillo (plus DPI plugins), mpv+yt-dlp.

My ~/.config/mpv/config:

    #inicio

    ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best

    vo=gl

    audio-pitch-correction=no

    quiet=yes

    pause=no

    vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all

    demuxer-cache-wait=yes

    demuxer-max-bytes=4MiB

    #fin

My ~/yt-dlp.conf

    #inicio de fichero
    
    --format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
    
    #fin de fichero

For the rest, I use streamlink from virtualenv (I do the same with yt-dlp) with a wrapper at $HOME/bin:

yt-dlp wrapper

    #!/bin/sh
 
    . $HOME/src/yt-dlp/bin/activate
    
    $HOME/src/yt-dlp/bin/yt-dlp "$@"

streamlink wrapper

    #!/bin/sh
    
   . $HOME/src/streamlink/bin/activate
   
    $HOME/src/streamlink/bin/yt-dlp "$@"

To install streamlink

       mkdir -p ~/src/streamlink

       cd ~/src/streamlink

       virtualenv .

       . bin/activate

       pip3 install -U streamlink

The same with yt-dlp:

      mkdir -p ~/src/yt-dlp

      cd ~/src/yt-dlp

       virtualenv .

      . bin/activate

      pip3 install -U yt-dlp

On the rest, I use mutt+msmtp+mbsync, slrn, sfeed, lynx/links, mocp, mupdf for PDF/CBZ/EPUB, nsxiv for images, tut for Mastodon and Emacs just for Telegram (I installed tdlib from OpenBSD packages and then I installed Telega from MELPA).

Overall it's a really fast machine. CWM+XTerm+Tmux it's my main environment. I have some SSH connection open to somewhere else at the 3rd tag (virtual desktop), and the 2nd one for Dillo.

krylon4• 12 months ago

Thank you very much!

UncleSlacky3• 12 months ago

antiX will be creating a Trixie-based 32-bit ISO. There's also Void, Alpine and Slackware (at least).

kachapopopow2• 12 months ago

Plasma 6.3 - I can finally ditch kde neon.

ACS_Solver5• 12 months ago

Not if you want to remain on new Plasma, you can expect Debian to lag several minor versions behind.

I've found it pretty easy though to use some KDE components built from source on top of the standard Debian packages. Build with kdesrc-build, then have those binaries linked to from your ~/bin and you're set. It might get difficult if you want to rebuild some key components like plasmashell itself but I've been using locally built versions of Kate and Konsole without issue.

foresto6• 12 months ago

you can expect Debian to lag several minor versions behind.

Not necessarily forever, though. Bookworm got minor Plasma updates, so I wouldn't be surprised if Trixie does as well.

charcircuit• 12 months ago

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?

aborsy• 12 months ago

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.

sohrob• 12 months ago

I 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.

Santosh833• 12 months ago

Arch isn't truly community driven?

perdomon• 12 months ago

How soon can I update my raspberry pi 5 from Bookworm to Trixie? Does PiOS have to initiate that first?

treve• 12 months ago

Raspberry Pi OS is a derivative and not straight up debian. It's not a released yet. A beta exists and looks like this one will support an in-place update

kwk1• 12 months ago

The images are a bit out of date, but check out https://raspi.debian.net/

pss314• 12 months ago

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://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#APT_sources_format

- 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.

__david__• 12 months ago

apt modernize-sources

Oh nifty, I hand converted all mine a couple years back. It would have been nice to have that then (or know about it?). I do really like the new deb822 format, having the gpg key inline is nice. I do hope that once this is out there the folks with custom public apt repos will start giving out .sources files directly. Should be more straightforward than all the apt-key junk one used to have to do (especially when a key rotated).

sgarland4• 12 months ago

Same. It took me a little bit to get used to it; my initial snap judgment was “this will be more annoying to create via scripting,” but then Ansible added deb822_repository [0] in 2.15 (shortly before Bookworm was released), and then it was no longer a concern.

[0] https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/ansible/...

duskwuff4• 12 months ago

Ooh, that's nice. Especially nice that it lets you specify both Suites: and Components: in the same stanza, so you don't have to repeat the rest of the line to add -updates and -backports suites.

sgarland4• 12 months ago

DEB822 was available from at least Buster [0]. I think Bullseye was the first release I used it in.

[0] https://manpages.debian.org/buster/apt/sources.list.5.en.htm...

chupasaurus• 12 months ago

It was announced in 2015 with apt 1.1 which was a major change of configuration, different things from it are being enforced each release since.

lucb1e2• 12 months ago

"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

luismedel• 12 months ago

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 :-)

dismalaf4• 12 months ago

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.

natebc• 12 months ago

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.

pabs311• 12 months ago

Lots of other ways for individuals, companies and other organisations to help too:

https://www.debian.org/intro/help

fhdnfjf• 12 months ago

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.

JonChesterfield3• 12 months ago

Testing is a rolling release. Unstable is a more exciting rolling release.

theandrewbailey• 12 months ago

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.

JonChesterfield3• 12 months ago

You're unlikely to install everything in it.

hsbauauvhabzb3• 12 months ago

I’m sure it’s small compared to some alternatives.

Biganon• 12 months ago

You're probably being sarcastic, but in the eventuality you aren't, this is if you install every single package.

LtdJorge• 12 months ago

No, it’s actually the disk usage of hosting a full mirror, other users commented on that

keernan• 12 months ago

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.

o11c• 12 months ago

That sounds concerning, especially since Debian had hard-coded (!) a tiny /boot partition for encrypted disks for a long time. This already caused problems quite frequently (you have to manually delete them quite frequently, and which inhibits your ability to revert after a kernel regression - which, hm, I have noted to have been relatively common for Debian 12 "Bookworm" compared to usual ... hopefully Trixie is better, but if it makes the kernel-management problem harder that's a bad sign)

shmerl• 12 months ago

Congrats to the Debian team!

nodesocket• 12 months ago

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-sources

int_19h3• 12 months ago

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

jcgl2• 12 months ago

You may not like it, but “arbitrary” isn’t a fair description; there’s reasoning behind it that is over 10 years old:

http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseFor...

That said, my knee-jerk is also that this is about strong-arming distros. Which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’d be interested to hear other viewpoints though.

int_19h3• 12 months ago

Note that this is about a different thing - Debian has also merged its /bin into /usr/bin, but now systemd also wants /usr/bin and /usr/sbin to be merged.

Arnavion• 12 months ago

No option to disable this either, per discussion in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1085370

The discussion in that bug is that the Debian maintainer (and upstream dev) is open to an upstream patch to add such an option.

kasabali9• 12 months ago

Debian maintainer (and upstream dev) is open to an upstream patch to add such an option

Wild interpretation right here.

There are only 2 realistic choices: Leave it as is or patch out the warning message in the Debian package

Debian maintainer is clearly deflecting the responsibility here because everyone knows very well that upstream wouldn't accept such a patch.

As it's already explained in the bug report, since Debian has no plan to do that migration in the near future, aforementioned warning isn't only useless and annoying, it's also potentially harmful, thus the correct action would be to remove it downstream like they did it in xscreensaver (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703#84)

But then they'd face the wrath of Lennart, so the only choice left is ignoring the report.

spookie• 12 months ago

Lovely.

TacticalCoder• 12 months ago

Debian choosing systemd (not that it's a new decision) is the reason I'll be switching my Proxmox to FreeBSD/bhyve (FreeBSD has great ZFS support btw).

Once I get the hypervisor systemd-free (no systemd on FreeBSD), I can then install a minimal distro in a VM mean to do containerization (like, say, the Talos Linux distro for K8s, that only has a few executables and they're all immutable) and then I can run containers that, by design, have something that is precisely not systemd as PID1.

So life is good: there's a systemd-free world at the end of the tunnel.

zahlman5• 12 months ago

Debian choosing systemd (not that it's a new decision) is the reason I'll be switching my Proxmox to FreeBSD/bhyve

Did you consider Devuan? Or is this just taking one annoyance as motivation to fix others at the same time?

creatonez2• 12 months ago

Why do you think this is an attempt at a persuasion tactic? Taint flags in this context just means something that might be relevant to debugging. Which this condition might be, if people in the future are unfamiliar with a potentially anachronistic split between /usr/bin and /usr/sbin. The debug message isn't there to judge the morality of your configuration. It's actively improving your ability to continue to support both ways, by properly indicating what style of system it is for troubleshooting purposes.

kasabali9• 12 months ago

Why do you think this is an attempt at a persuasion tactic

Because they said so:

As part of that we sometimes adopt schemes that were previously used by only one of the distributions and push it to a level where it's the default of systemd, trying to gently push everybody towards the same set of basic configuration [1]

1. https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

int_19h3• 11 months ago

How and why is this relevant to debugging?

Also, like it or not, the word "tainted" bears a negative connotation. It's hard to imagine that it was chosen arbitrarily.

ilvez• 12 months ago

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.

starkparker2• 12 months ago

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.

account426• 12 months ago

Well Fedora is the equivalent of testing for Red Hat and Arch is Arch.

starkparker2• 12 months ago

Even Arch kept SDL2 libs in the repo as a fallback. Fedora jumped straight from SDL2 in the repo to sdl2-compat or nothing. The only way to get consistent SDL2 builds on F42 is by building SDL2 from source.

anthk2• 12 months ago

I used to like Debian when configuring ALSA/OSS, XFree86 and such was a source of nightmares. Thus, debconf as a middle layer mechanism to handle several distinct architectures, setups and hardware was a neccesity. Ditto with Yast2 on SuSE. By 2004-2005... not much.

Even a bare Slackware with KDE and KDEi (and even XFCE) can do tons of work by itself by just adding an user and accepting the default group belonging array by pressing 'up' at the prompt.

Heck, even OpenBSD, minus the volume automount, which can be handled in a breeze with toadd or tray-app in seconds; and if you are smart you can figure DBUS/FDo mount points and integrate then with XFCE/Plasma/Gnome without too much issues (hotplugd can handle device umounting if you set up doas.conf accordinly).

The rest? MESA and X.org will handle most of the graphics stuff. Video and audio drivers are autodetected on almost every GNU and *BSD. Printers are often wireless bound so any assistant with look it up fast and attach it to CUPS.

Still, I can't handle DPKG/APT's slowness, even if there are libre distros as Trisquel with it. If they rebased their distro as a simpler Parabola LTS release with either Mate or LXDE setups, the user experience would be almost the same, but installing packages would happen at a much faster pace.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 12 months ago

dpkg/apt in Debian fells slower even compared with dpkg/apt in Ubuntu, not sure why that's the case

endorphine• 12 months ago

If you're upgrading, see https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/upgradi....

LoveMortuus2• 12 months ago

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?

jama2112• 12 months ago

Linux mint technically still does, perhaps because they’re lagging behind Debian. AntiX does but that has its own tradeoffs. With full potential respect for your situation, if you’re not able to obtain 64 bit hardware, there’s nothing that wrong with not upgrading your OS for now

2b3a51• 12 months ago

Bookworm will get updates for another year if I have read the Debian Wiki correctly so perhaps there is no need for immediate action as Bookworm becomes oldstable?

In addition to Mint and AntiX there is also Slackware (I use xfce rather than KDE) but adding software outside the (large) base install is not an 'apt-get thing' process.

Salix Linux, based on Slackware, does have package repositories with a reasonable selection of applications. Salix is based on the stable Slackware 15.0 so has nicely aged packages.

Void Linux also has an xfce4 based live i686 iso you can look at and decide to install from.

account426• 12 months ago

Gentoo still supports it but depending on what you want, compile times with modern compilers on old hardware are a pain.

morserer2• 12 months ago

They 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!

https://reproduce.debian.net/

guerby2• 12 months ago

Is there a tool on a given debian trixie system to know what installed packages are not currently reproducible?

Alternative to parsing the reproduce web site :)

morserer2• 12 months ago

Yes! From the site: sudo apt install debian-repro-status; debian-repro-status

MuffinFlavored2• 12 months ago

Could you help me understand why the remaining 5% is not bit-for-bit reproducible? For example... if you download a tar of sources pinned to a version, and you run `./configure` and `make` in some kind of container and it doesn't embed some kind of timestamp... why are 95% reproducible and some aren't? Would like to learn/understand.

JonChesterfield3• 12 months ago

Hashtables keyed off the address of objects would be an example.

On multiple runs, malloc gives out different addresses (thanks to threads or security concerns) which means things end up in different slots in the table. Then you iterate through it in memory order and you're seeing objects in non-deterministic order, which you do things with.

Embedding file paths / timestamps / git shas and similar was popular for a while too and unhelpful for reproducible builds.

andersa• 12 months ago

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.

jjgreen2• 12 months ago

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

will install into /usr/local/local, so one has to use the prefix /usr. The same command on, say, OpenSuSE will install into /usr and break your system. Barking mad.

https://sources.debian.org/src/python3.7/3.7.3-2+deb10u3/deb...

zahlman5• 12 months ago

python3.7

Certainly a terrible UX, but the motivation is clear: they're trying to get PEP 668 protections for older versions.

Virtual environments work a lot better anyway, honestly. (With a properly crafted `pyvenv.cfg`, it should be possible to convince Python that your /usr/local is a virtual environment, but I can't be sure offhand if there are any serious negative consequences of that.)

MuffinFlavored2• 12 months ago

python3.7 is from June 27th, 2018

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-370/

Why is that the default?

Aldipower• 12 months ago

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..

teleforce• 12 months ago

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.

3836293648• 12 months ago

Sure, but XP came with minimal amounts of bundled software, that's every package in the debian repo.

CRConrad2• 11 months ago

Windows XP with approximately 45 millions lines of code, arguably the best Windows OS ever.

Naah. Early(ish) Win7, or maybe even late Vista.

torium• 12 months ago

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)

geeB• 12 months ago

Io i

whydoyouasking• 11 months ago

TL;DR: Big fat warning to everyone, who's using X11 session on Debian (especially, laptop users): DO NOT UPDATE.

Issues I experiencing right now *AFTER* migration Debian 12 -> 13 on X11: 1. kwin_x11, kscreenlocker_greet, Xorg and ksmserver are eating CPU as hell after screen is locked: known issues in KDE6/QT6, affected versions Qt 6.8, 6.9 and 6.10, fixed in Qt 6.9.2 and 6.10.0. Guess which version of Qt is used in Debian 13. 2. "Disks & Devices" applet is reporting wrong disk state (mounted/unmounted) when disk have Device Auto-Mount enabled "On Attach". 3. Track-point device, touch-pad and Bluetooth mouse now is treated as a single device without a way of separating settings for them. Yep, touch-pad settings tab says "No touchpad found". Right now I basically need either agree with changed way of navigation in CAD and browsers with my mouse, or forget about using scroll with my track-pad, or switch the "Press middle button and move mouse to scroll" on every occasion of switching input device.

And all of these I found in just two days of using this release. I need to stress the fact that before the update, when it was Debian 12 and KDE5 it was working smoothly, as expected and with all settings accessible from UI. Now, to fix all of this, I need to crawl configs, add scripts, workarounds and so on. It looks like Debian updates now needs to be ignored the same way as it happening with Ubuntu (3+ month), MacOS (5+ month) or Windows (don't).

Debian 13 “Trixie”

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