After two years of intense development, The release of the new version of Debian 13 has been announced., known as "Trixie." This release guarantees support and updates for the next five years, along with a repository that, in this version, reaches the impressive number of 69,830 binary packages, surpassing the 5,411 offered in Debian 12.
During this transition, 14,116 new packages were added, while 8,844 obsolete or abandoned packages were removed, representing 12% of the previous total. Additionally, 44,326 packages were updated, or 63% of the total, reflecting a constant effort to keep the system modern and secure.
Notable changes and improvements in Debian 13
Among the most relevant developments is the Official addition of a port for systems based on the 64-bit RISC-V architecture, was also added experimental port «loong64»«, compatible with the LoongArch architecture used in Loongson 3 5000 processors, although still without official support. On the other hand, Debian 13 has decided to drop support for the "mipsel" and "mips64el" architectures, historical versions that had significant technical limitations such as the 2 GB memory limit and compilation difficulties.
On the part of the creation of kernel assemblies and packages for 86-bit x32 systems has been stopped, maintaining only one official repository for packages and support for multi-architecture containers. In practice, the i386 architecture is now primarily geared toward running 32-bit applications on 86-bit x64_64 systems, improving efficiency and compatibility.
Among the improvements featured in this new release of Debian 13 "Trixie," the complete fix for the 2038 issue is the migration of all packages to use the 64-bit time_t data type on 32-bit architectures. This eliminates historical limitations that prevented handling of dates after January 2038.
In addition, the installer of Debian 13 has received significant improvements, including a new logic for EFI partition management and a recovery mode for systems using Btrfs subvolumes. Additionally, the installation has been optimized by removing unnecessary firmware that depended on non-free packages, ensuring a cleaner experience that complies with free software policies.
On the other hand, Support for older tools like grub-legacy and win32-loader has been discontinued, while restoring support for non-ASCII characters in full usernames.
La list of compatible hardware has been expanded with devices such as Pine64 Pinebook, MNT Reform 2, AM64x HummingBoard-T, Pine64 Star64, Wandboard rev D1, and devices based on the Snapdragon X Elite ARM SoC, reaffirming Debian's commitment to a wide variety of platforms.
Boot, file system, and security improvements
Debian 13 introduces the "HTTP Boot" remote boot mode in its installer and Live versions, allowing the loading of ISO images using the HTTP protocol via the UEFI or U-Boot interface, facilitating installation in modern and flexible environments.
The file system tmpfs is now used to host the temporary directory /tmp, located in RAM and can be migrated to the swap partition if necessaryThis change reduces the number of disk writes, lowers hard drive power consumption, extends the lifespan of SSD drives, and improves performance when managing temporary files. For those who need to revert this behavior, the "systemctl mask tmp.mount" command allows you to restore the use of a traditional file system.
Regarding security, the last, lastb, and lastlog commands have been removed due to incompatibilities with the new 64-bit time_t type. Instead, it is recommended to use the wtmpdb, lastlog2, and lslogins utilities, which offer similar functionality adapted to the new standards. The systemd-cryptsetup package has been added to facilitate the automatic detection and mounting of encrypted file systems, increasing data security.
Advanced protection and update of essential components
To protect AMD64 and ARM64 systems, Debian 13 uses advanced extensions such as Intel CET, ARM PAC and BTI, that prevent attacks based on return-oriented programming techniques (ROP). These mechanisms store return addresses in a separate shadow stack, making them difficult for attackers trying to exploit existing code fragments to manipulate.
Added support for the run0 utility from systemd, which allows processes to run securely under different user IDs, and which acts as a more robust replacement for sudo.
The package manager APT has been renewed with the 3.0 branch, which brings an improved user interface, a Solver3 dependency resolution engine and snapshot supportAdditionally, the apt-key utility has been removed and an OpenSSL-based cryptographic backend has been added, along with a new 'dist-clean' command to keep the system clean and up-to-date.
The distribution also includes the debian-repro-status command, which is useful for verifying that installed packages are reproducible, strengthening confidence in the software's integrity.
Updates to the kernel, graphical environments, and applications
The Linux kernel was updated to version 6.12, accompanying the renewal of essential components such as systemd 257, bash 5.2.37, Glibc 2.41 and OpenSSL 3.5.
The desktop environments available in Debian 13 includes the latest versions of GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, LXDE 13, LXQt 2.1.0, and Xfce 4.20, along with an updated graphics stack to improve the visual and performance experience.
The User applications also received major updates, standing out LibreOffice 25.2, GIMP 3.0.2, Inkscape 1.4 and Vim 9.1, ensuring greater functionality and stability for users.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the new version of Debian 13 is now available For a total of eight official architectures, these include the popular Intel IA-32/x86 (i686), AMD64/x86-64, and ARM in various variants, as well as less conventional architectures such as RISC-V, PowerPC 64 (ppc64el), and IBM System z (s390x).