Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie

Summary

By Joe BrockmeierAugust 20, 2025 After more than two years of development, the Debian Project has released its new stable version, Debian 13 ("trixie"). The release comes with the usual bounty of upgraded packages and more than 14,000 new packages; it also debuts Advanced Package Tool (APT) 3.0 as the default package manager and makes 64-bit RISC-V a supported architecture. There are few surprises with trixie, which is exactly what many Linux users are hoping for—a free operating system that just works as expected. Debian's stable releases are aptly named; the project prioritizes stability over shipping the latest software. The freeze schedule for trixie called for a soft freeze in April, which meant that (for example) the KDE Plasma 6.4 release in June was too late to make the cut—even though trixie was not released until August. Users who prefer to live on the edge will want to run another distribution or follow Debian development by running the testing release that previews the next stable version—Debian 14 ("forky"). Truly adventurous users may take their chances with the unstable ("sid") release. That said, trixie is up-to-date enough for many folks; it includes GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, Xfce 4.20, GNU Emacs 30.1, GnuPG 2.4.7, LibreOffice 25.2, and more. Under the hood, it includes the most recent Linux LTS kernel (6.12.41), GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 14.2, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.41, LLVM/Clang 19, Python 3.13, Rust 1.85, and systemd 257. The release notes have a section for well-known software that compares the version in Debian 12 against Debian 13. While some of the versions lag a bit behind the upstream, they are not woefully outdated. The project now supports six major hardware architectures: x86-64/amd64, 32-bit Arm with a hardware FPU (armhf), 64-bit Arm (arm64), IBM POWER8 or newer (ppc64el), IBM S/390 (s390x), and 64-bit RISC-V. The i386 architecture is not supported for trixie, though the project continues to build some i386 packages to run on 64-...