[HN Gopher] Debian 13 "Trixie"
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Debian 13 "Trixie"
        
       Author : ducktective
       Score  : 425 points
       Date   : 2025-08-09 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.debian.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.debian.org)
        
       | gorgoiler wrote:
       | 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
        
       | Paianni wrote:
       | The Devuan version may end up being the last that GNOME will run
       | on...
        
       | superkuh wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | bbarnett wrote:
         | Also watch out for surprise file deletes in /tmp and /var/tmp
         | at 10 and 30 days.
         | 
         | This too can be turned off.
        
           | KORraN wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | superkuh wrote:
             | On boot has been the standard for a long time and is still
             | the most common. I am personally surprised to hear that now
             | Debian and some distros do it via various automated ways at
             | time intervals.
        
         | bryanlarsen wrote:
         | Infinite scroll length on terminals can chew through /tmp, and
         | systems misbehave strangely when they're out of /tmp.
        
         | bayindirh wrote:
         | 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
        
       | 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | cocoto wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | cocoto wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | accrual wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | josteink wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | prmoustache wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | simion314 wrote:
           | >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.
        
             | prmoustache wrote:
             | the graphical installer was debian's new experimental
             | installer. They just decided to release a stable distro
             | before debian with it.
             | 
             | Proprietary driver installation was the sole reason of
             | existence of Linux Mint which was a fork of ubuntu, so your
             | memory is incorrect.
        
         | foresto wrote:
         | > 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.
        
       | josteink wrote:
       | 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 :)
        
       | bbarnett wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | Wait, sysvinit on debian 13 truly practically works?? as in,
         | one can remove systemd and have a working server OS with sysv
         | init??
        
           | bbarnett wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | foresto wrote:
         | Thank you for sharing this. I'm inclined to adopt it in my lxc
         | containers, at least.
        
         | RVuRnvbM2e wrote:
         | Why would you want to do this?
        
       | accrual wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | zozbot234 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | michaelt wrote:
             | My Linux machine is very modern, but I still need i386
             | architecture support installed, because Steam requires
             | 32-bit support. And Steam requires 32-bit support so people
             | can play 15-year-old games.
             | 
             | (Admittedly, the 32-bit support Ubuntu ships is less than a
             | full OS and you can't install Ubuntu on a 32-bit machine
             | these days)
        
               | progval wrote:
               | So you have an amd64 CPU and Debian's "i386" packages
               | will keep working on it. As per the release notes:
               | 
               | > The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used
               | on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU.
        
               | herewulf wrote:
               | Maybe it's one of those games that runs too fast if the
               | CPU isn't clocked at 33 MHz. ;)
               | 
               | It would probably take a few days to start Steam on one
               | of those considering its load times on current hardware.
        
             | KennyBlanken wrote:
             | According to Passmark the Pentinum 4 1.3Ghz is 55 times
             | slower than a Raspberry Pi 5, so I'd guess it's at least
             | two orders of magnitude. The original Pi is 16 times faster
             | than a P4 1.3Ghz...
             | 
             | You can recycle e-waste (and yes, I know SOME e-waste ends
             | up in China/India/etc. Not all does.)
             | 
             | The e-waste is of substantially less concern than the
             | _massive_ difference in carbon footprint from power
             | consumption.
        
           | munchlax wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | tremon wrote:
             | _If the official i386 arch was built with instructions that
             | your hardware doesn 't support, tough cookies_
             | 
             | While theoretically possible, that would only happen on
             | processors older than 30 years. Debian's i386 architecture
             | still uses -march=i686 as its baseline compiler target,
             | which is the venerable Pentium Pro:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6_(microarchitecture)
        
               | avhon1 wrote:
               | I have AMD Geode hardware circa 2007 (18 years old) that
               | only has partial support for i686. Requires a true
               | 3/4/586 kernel.
        
           | tremon wrote:
           | 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/bina
           | ry-i386/Packages.gz | zgrep ^Package: | wc -l       66958
        
         | NewJazz wrote:
         | Well, isn't there an additional year or so of support for old
         | stable? So beyond 2025.
        
           | abhinavk wrote:
           | Buster is supported until June 2028.
        
             | NewJazz wrote:
             | Thanks, I assume some of that is sort of extended,
             | asterisked support though?
        
         | badsectoracula wrote:
         | AFAICT this refers to Debian support, the Linux kernel does
         | support 32bit CPUs though only since the original Pentium
         | (excluding some clones).
        
         | esaym wrote:
         | Are you confusing "386" with 32bit? 686 is the normal 32bit
         | arch. 386 is something from the 1980's right?
        
           | NewJazz wrote:
           | AIUI Debian kept the i386 name for the arch even as their 32
           | bit requirements evolved.
        
           | bowsamic wrote:
           | i386 is the most common term used for 32 bit x86
           | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-32
        
           | accrual wrote:
           | 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".
        
       | potato-peeler wrote:
       | > 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | tremon wrote:
           | 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).
        
       | ACS_Solver wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | > after Ubuntu went way downhill and haven't had cause to
         | regret it.
         | 
         | In what way Ubuntu went downhill?
        
           | happymellon wrote:
           | Snaps? Proprietary package managers are never great.
        
             | mmcnl wrote:
             | I don't really understand why this is such a big problem.
             | You don't have to use snaps.
        
               | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
               | You really have to work to avoid them; ex. `apt install
               | firefox` will install the snap
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | You're right. You don't have to use snaps. Ubuntu
               | migrates packages slowly in behalf of you.
               | 
               | Using apt to install some packages installs snap plumbing
               | and downloads the package as a snap automatically. You
               | don't have to install it manually.
               | 
               | There's no malicious intent though, it's made to "impose
               | a positive pressure on the snap team to produce better
               | work and keep their quality high" (paraphrased, but this
               | was the official answer).
        
               | hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
               | And one of these migrations broke my workflow
               | substantially enough that a dist-upgrade turned into a
               | complete system reformat to Debian and cost hours that I
               | couldn't afford.
               | 
               | Debian has been a safe haven since.
        
               | LeoPanthera wrote:
               | You sort of do. It's really hard to avoid them, because
               | they've modified "apt" to install snaps by default
               | without asking.
        
               | npteljes wrote:
               | Defaults matter a lot, and snaps are the default in
               | Ubuntu.
               | 
               | The topic is not whether snaps are avoidable or not, but
               | the Ubuntu is going downhill. And snaps are purported to
               | be part of that downhill, which would be Ubuntu's NIH
               | syndrome. As far as I know, Ubuntu's only successful
               | development is Ubuntu itself - the other projects have
               | all failed over the years, and snap, while ongoing, is
               | not winning any popularity contests either.
        
               | Santosh83 wrote:
               | Snaps per se are no better or worse than flatpak.
               | Canonical's mistake, IMO, was to make _their_ store the
               | only place snaps can be hosted. That is the
               | "proprietary" bit everyone keeps talking about.
               | 
               | But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic place
               | you can publish your flatpak if you want any traction at
               | all would be flathub, so both formats have only one store
               | right now. But flatpak allows a custom store while for
               | some strange reason Canonical decided not to allow snap
               | that freedom.
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | Another problem is, Canonical promised to release server
               | components and enable alternative stores, and just
               | _forgot_ that they made that pledge.
               | 
               | Also, rugpulling users and migrating things to snaps
               | without asking their users in order to "create a positive
               | pressure on snap team to keep their quality high" didn't
               | sit well with the users.
               | 
               | > But in practice even for flatpak the only realistic
               | place you can publish your flatpak if you want any
               | traction at all would be flathub
               | 
               | But, for any size of fleet from homelab to an enterprise
               | client farm, I can host my local flathub and install my
               | personal special-purpose flatpaks without paying anyone
               | and thinking whether my packages will be there next
               | morning.
               | 
               | Freedom matters, esp. it that's the norm in that
               | ecosystem.
               | 
               | I was neutral-ish about Ubuntu, but I flat out avoid them
               | now, and migrate any remaining Ubuntu server to Debian in
               | shortest way possible.
               | 
               | I'm using Debian for the last 20 years or so, BTW.
        
               | npteljes wrote:
               | Yes, same. I started with Ubuntu back in the day, because
               | the server I inherited ran Ubuntu, and it was just
               | natural after that for me to run it on the desktop as
               | well. I grew to dislike their NIH over the years, tried
               | distro hopping, and settled on Debian.
        
               | npteljes wrote:
               | Yes, I agree. Snaps or Flatpak, not much of a practical,
               | technological difference. What sets them apart is the way
               | the distribution is handled, including the open source
               | availability of the backend, which enabled for example
               | Red Hat and Elementary to run their own stores.
        
               | type0 wrote:
               | If you are making your own distro, creating your own
               | flatpak store is trivial, that's all what matters. Linux
               | Mint doesn't use snap exactly because Canonical forces
               | everyone to use their snap store.
        
               | dismalaf wrote:
               | Canonical doesn't force anyone to use anything. Snap is
               | open source, just modify it to use a different store if
               | you want. Mint literally forked a zombie DE, but changing
               | a few lines of code in snap is an issue...
        
               | fsflover wrote:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44849691
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | > which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome
               | 
               | Red Hat do the same. They reinvented the wheel on
               | multiple occasions (systemd and it's whole ecosystem like
               | systemd-resolved and timed and the whole kitchen sink;
               | podman, buildah, dnf, etc etc.)
               | 
               | They just have more success on getting their NIH babies
               | accepted as the standard by everyone else. Canonical just
               | fail at that (often for good reasons, Unity was downright
               | crap for some time) and abandon stuff, which doesn't help
               | their future causes.
        
               | tasuki wrote:
               | I'm with my neighbor comments. How do you use Ubuntu
               | without snaps? The base Ubuntu install already comes with
               | several snaps. Installing random things through apt leads
               | to snaps. I personally do not know how to avoid snaps on
               | Ubuntu.
        
               | superb_dev wrote:
               | If you use Ubuntu, yes you do. It's why I ditched Ubuntu
        
               | wkat4242 wrote:
               | Yes you do. Some packages aren't available anymore in apt
        
             | Santosh83 wrote:
             | As I understand it, snap the package format is _not_
             | proprietary. Its as open source as say flatpak. What is
             | proprietary is Canonical official snap store, and they
             | patch their version of snap to _only_ use that store. It 'd
             | be the same as flatpak being tied to only flathub.
             | 
             | Of course that goes against the spirit of FOSS, but there's
             | a bit more nuance there than simply saying "snaps are
             | proprietary".
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | Did they release the server components for hosting your
               | own snap repositories, yet?
               | 
               | I can't seem to find it. Any pointers would be helpful,
               | so at least I can know the latest state of this thing.
        
               | curt15 wrote:
               | Snapd still hardcodes Canonical's snap store signing key
               | and provides no mechanism to add your own keys. Any other
               | snap repos will be treated as second class citizens.
        
               | dismalaf wrote:
               | No, but it's trivial to implement since Snap is open
               | source so you know exactly what sort of payload it wants.
        
               | tannhaeuser wrote:
               | Snaps don't just suck from an ideological but also
               | practical perspective, as described for Thunderbird.
               | Firefox on Ubuntu has also serious permission issues with
               | webcam support OOTB even experts are struggling with
               | (involving AppArmor, pipewire, snap, and FF device
               | config). and has become unusable for things like browser-
               | only MS Teams on mainstream notebooks.
               | 
               | Containers, popular as they may be on servers, can only
               | add breakage and overhead to desktops, especially for an
               | established and already much better organized system like
               | Debian's apt. There just haven't been any new desktop
               | apps for way over a decade that would warrant yet another
               | level of indirection.
        
               | bombela wrote:
               | In addition, applications under snap are much slower to
               | start. That's just not acceptable.
        
           | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
           | Snaps, and ads in the motd
        
             | bayindirh wrote:
             | Plus reduced support duration to increase adoption of
             | Ubuntu Pro. Changing some packages ever slightly so they
             | behave a little differently.
             | 
             | Switch to sudo-rs, uu-coreutils (rust based stuff), etc.,
             | etc.
             | 
             | It's not a Debian derivative anymore. It's something else.
             | 
             | Was not my cup of tea before, it's even more not my cup of
             | tea now.
        
               | john01dav wrote:
               | Switching to rust-based system software is very different
               | from the clearly profit seeking (or control seeking which
               | is just long term profit seeking) changes like ads and
               | snap (with massive friction to not using snap).
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | Yes, but I prefer glibc + GNU Coreutils based systems in
               | my installations. They're additional nails on top of the
               | (fatal) ones like snap, Ubuntu Pro and MOTD ads.
        
           | Eduard wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | rahen wrote:
             | LXD was forked as Incus, and it's an absolute delight.
             | 
             | Seamless LXC and virtual machine management with
             | clustering, a clean API, YAML templates and a built-in load
             | balancer, it's like Kubernetes for stateful workloads.
        
           | nextos wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | kev009 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | homebrewer wrote:
             | > in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian?
             | 
             | Their lawyers' willingness to risk shipping pre-built zfs
             | kernel modules (that are always in sync with the kernel).
             | Pretty important if you're into that sort of thing, it's
             | easier to remove cruft once post-install than to keep an
             | eye on DKMS for years (making sure that it hasn't
             | disassembled itself and continues working).
        
           | doublepg23 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | bayindirh wrote:
             | Well, I don't know which trendy distro the dev is
             | referring, but Debian is complete opposite of Trendy. It's
             | a bedrock distro silently running almost everywhere in some
             | form or shape.
             | 
             | Most of the Linux-based (enterprise and/or embedded)
             | appliances are built upon Debian, for example.
             | 
             | P.S.: The total number of Debian installations and their
             | derivatives are unknown BTW. Debian installations and infra
             | _do not collect_ such information. You can install
             | "popularity-contest", but the question defaults to "no"
             | during installation, so most people do not send in package
             | selection lists, unlike Canonical's tracking of snap
             | installations.
        
           | ACS_Solver wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
         | 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
        
         | madars wrote:
         | >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.
        
           | bayindirh wrote:
           | Which GPU, display server and compositor stack are you using?
        
             | madars wrote:
             | Integrated Intel GPU and no graphical system, just KMS VT
             | (text console). That's what made it so frustrating - only
             | displaying a console should not result in kernel panics
             | under CPU load! Admittedly, the experience was anecdotal
             | and years ago and I heard Debian is doing less of a RHEL-
             | style "frankenkernel" now.
        
               | bayindirh wrote:
               | Intel's integrated GPU driver team, actually all driver
               | teams, had a period of frequent screw-ups a while back
               | (five years ago? Time flies). They also borked e1000e
               | driver in the same period.
               | 
               | On the other hand, I had and still have many Debian
               | installations, some with Intel integrated graphics. None
               | of them created any problems for a very, very long time.
               | To be honest, I don't remember even any of my Intel iGPU
               | systems crashed.
               | 
               | ...and I use Debian for almost two decades, and I have
               | seen tons of GPU problems. I used to write my Xorg.conf
               | files without using man, heh. :)
               | 
               | Maybe you can give Debian another chance.
        
               | ACS_Solver wrote:
               | drm/i915 was a pretty miserable experience for me on one
               | machine. The Intel drivers for that chipset around the
               | 5.3 kernel era weren't good, I recall lots of bug reports
               | at the time. Below is one of the several issues that I
               | was affected by
               | 
               | https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/6
               | 73
        
           | brirec wrote:
           | 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...
        
           | kasabali wrote:
           | > 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.
        
             | raggi wrote:
             | LTS has had major breaking changes in various areas in
             | recent times too, virtio was badly broken at one point this
             | year, as was a commonly used netlink interface. Hat tip to
             | the Arch kernel contributors who helped track this down and
             | chase upstream, as we had mutually affected users. The
             | debian and ubuntu bug trackers were a wasteland of silence
             | and user contributions throughout the situation, and
             | frustratingly continued to be so as AWS, GCP and others
             | copied their kernel patch trees and blindly shipped the
             | same problems to users and refused to respond to bugs and
             | emails.
             | 
             | You're right stability comes from testing, not enough
             | testing happens around Linux period, regardless of which
             | branch is being discussed.
             | 
             | It's not easy testing kernels, but the bar is pretty low.
        
           | seba_dos1 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | foresto wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | rbanffy wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | master_crab wrote:
       | _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.
        
         | baobun wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | bbarnett wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | duskwuff wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | AstroBen wrote:
         | 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
        
       | binwiederhier wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | Just wanted to say thanks for ntfy! I use it daily to notify me
         | on events from my home Meshtastic node.
        
         | tremon wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | _> 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?
        
             | baobun wrote:
             | Yes but not all packages written in those languages are.
        
         | baobun wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | It might be a better idea to release this as a container (if it
         | isn't already) to take care of the dependencies.
        
         | leansensei wrote:
         | Thank you for ntfy, it's such a useful piece of software!
        
       | Venn1 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | sheerun wrote:
       | Debian was often the only linux os that worked on old
       | "spacestations" of mine. Great sentiment
        
         | sheerun wrote:
         | And I mean Debian 12, not some old version, much more
         | impressive
        
       | gcarvalho wrote:
       | Looking forward to upgrade over the weekend.
       | 
       | Have had my RPi on Debian since Debian 9, with smooth upgrades
       | every time.
        
       | imoverclocked wrote:
       | 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."
        
       | markus_zhang wrote:
       | When can we have Bandit or Bluey?
        
         | Balinares wrote:
         | Presumably not before Debian runs out of Toy Story characters.
        
           | seba_dos1 wrote:
           | ...and since there's Toy Story 5 scheduled for 2026, the pool
           | of yet unused characters will become larger again soon.
        
       | juujian wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | lucb1e wrote:
         | 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
        
       | bbarnett wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | foresto wrote:
         | 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
        
       | bayindirh wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Pet_Ant wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | duskwuff wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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_Ant wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | yonatan8070 wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | kev009 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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
        
         | ndiddy wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | Narishma wrote:
       | > 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.
        
       | krylon wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | Out of curiosity, what do you use these netbooks for?
        
         | homebrewer wrote:
         | Alpine supports i686, I see no current deprecation plans. This
         | may change in the next three years though, who knows.
        
       | kachapopopow wrote:
       | Plasma 6.3 - I can finally ditch kde neon.
        
         | ACS_Solver wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | foresto wrote:
           | > 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | perdomon wrote:
       | How soon can I update my raspberry pi 5 from Bookworm to Trixie?
       | Does PiOS have to initiate that first?
        
         | treve wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | The images are a bit out of date, but check out
         | https://raspi.debian.net/
        
       | pss314 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | lucb1e wrote:
       | > "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 wrote:
       | 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 :-)
        
       | dismalaf wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | 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.
        
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