Debian 13 “Trixie” has just been released with Linux 6.12 LTS, GNOME 48 desktop environment (default), GCC 14.2 compiler, and over 14100 new packages for a total of 69830 packages. This follows the Debian 12 Bookworm release in June 2023 with Linux 6.1.
While we had previously tested Debian 12 on RISC-V, Debian 13 is the first release that officially supports 64-bit RISC-V. Debian 13 will serve as the base for Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, and many other Linux distributions.
Other Debian 13 highlights:
- Hardening against Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) exploits and Call/Jump-Oriented Programming (COP/JOP) attacks on amd64 and arm64 targets.
- HTTP Boot Support – The Debian Installer and Debian Live Images can now be booted using “HTTP Boot” on supported UEFI and U-Boot firmware.
- Improved manual pages translations (especially Romanian and Polish)
- BDIC Binary Hunspell Dictionary Support
- Spell-checking support in Qt WebEngine web browsers (Privacy Browser and Falkon); implemented through BDIC Binary Hunspell Dictionary Support
- 64-bit time_t ABI transition – 64-bit time fixes the year 2038 (Y2K38) bug, except for the i386 architecture (legacy software). On 32-bit architectures (armel and armhf), third-party software and packages will need to be recompiled/rebuilt.
- Debian progress towards reproducible builds
- wcurl (wget alternative) and HTTP/3 support in curl. HTTP/3 requests can be made with the flags –http3 or –http3-only.
- (Some of the) updated packages
- GNOME 48
- KDE Plasma 6.3 (first Debian release with Plasma 6)
- LXDE 13
- LXQt 2.1.0
- Xfce 4.20
- LibreOffice 25
- Emacs 30.1
- GCC 14.2
- GNU C library 2.41
- Linux 6.12 LTS
- Python 3.13
- 8844 packages have been removed, 12% of the packages in bookworm
Debian 13 now officially supports the following architectures: amd64, arm64, armel (last release), armhf, ppc64el,riscv64, and s390x. i386 (32-bit x86) is still there, but it’s intended for legacy functions only, and dist-upgrades to trixie are not supported. MIPS is really dead, at least when it comes with Debian, as mipsel and mips64el are no longer supported. For more details, refer to the release notes.
You’ll find the latest Debian 13 image for each architecture on the Debian website. It’s also possible to upgrade from Debian 12 to Debian 13 using the following command:
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sudo apt full-upgrade |
But Debian developers provide a long, recommended to-do list before running this command.
Raspberry Pi OS “Trixie” should be released in the next few weeks. I had never really checked which version of Debian was used in Ubuntu until today. It turns out Ubuntu has been using Debian 13 since Ubuntu 23.10 (as soon as development for Debian 13 started), and my current Ubuntu 24.04 installation is indeed based on Trixie:
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jaufranc@CNX-LAPTOP-5:~$ cat /etc/issue Ubuntu 24.04 LTS \n \l jaufranc@CNX-LAPTOP-5:~$ cat /etc/debian_version trixie/sid |
So Ubuntu will switch to a newer version of Debian long before the official release.
Via Phoronix
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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