Debian 13 ‘trixie’ Is Here: What’s New in the Universal Operating System

After more than two years of development, the Debian Project has unveiled a new stable release of its operating system—Debian 13, codenamed trixie. It will receive updates and security fixes for five years, thanks to the efforts of the Debian Security Team and the Long Term Support initiative.

The release introduces over 14,000 new packages, bringing the total to nearly 70,000. More than 8,800 obsolete packages have been removed, and over 44,000 have been updated. It ships with modern versions of popular applications and core components, including the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel, GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, LibreOffice 25.2, GCC 14.2, Python 3.13, PHP 8.4, PostgreSQL 17, OpenSSL 3.5, and dozens more.

For the first time, Debian 13 officially supports the riscv64 architecture, while retaining compatibility with six other hardware platforms, including amd64, arm64, ppc64el, and IBM System z. Support for i386 as a primary architecture has been discontinued—it is now available only for execution on 64-bit processors. This release will also be the last to support armel.

The system is offered in editions for desktops, servers, clusters, cloud platforms, and containers. Cloud images—available for Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, and other services—are optimized for rapid deployment and come preconfigured with cloud-init. Users can also try Debian 13 without installation via live images for amd64 and arm64, available with various desktop environments.

The Debian Installer now features enhanced hardware support, system recovery tools for btrfs, secure boot support via systemd-boot, and numerous other improvements. Installation can be performed from DVD, CD, USB, over the network, or using HTTP Boot. Debian 13 is available in 78 languages.

Before upgrading from Debian 12 bookworm, developers recommend making a full data backup and reviewing the release notes, which outline potential issues—such as changes to TLS settings for OpenLDAP. Upgrades can be performed using standard APT tools and typically proceed without complications.

Debian remains a universal operating system—equally suited for desktop PCs, servers, embedded solutions, and cloud infrastructures. The new release reaffirms the project’s commitment to free software, quality, and exceptional configurability.