Debian 13 Trixie

Updated 12-Aug-2025

Note: It's out, and looking good. No Backports repositories yet.

Trixie is release 13 of Debian GNU/Linux. It will be officially released likely sometime in August. It is common to answer the question: When will Debian (number) be released? with When it is ready. And so, an exact date cannot be predetermined, until close to the actual release date. At this point we do have more (tentative) info about the release:

• Freeze 27 July
• Release 09 August

That said, as of mid-July (and earlier, of course) migrating to Trixie can be done. This is more-or-less a beta release (or release-candidate release). That said, the same steps are to be used upon the official release. In any case, much if not all of Trixie is frozen and we are in final bug-hunt and tweak mode.

Note as of 25 July 25 I've got four systems (two servers, two desktops, including on debian chromebook) all running and up-to-date.

Note as of 29 July 25 I've got six systems on Trixie, including one from a Trixie RC-2 USB install. Everything is going swimmingly at this point. All errors or issues below no longer exist (though I am no longer using Extrepo, so those issues might or might not be improved upon).

What is not working in Trixie (as of this date)

• Some issues with SSH, still need to troubleshoot.
• See the Trixie Issues page on Debian.
• See the excellent What to expect in Debian Trixie.
• Currently the printing on a Samsung ML 1860 laserprinter does not work. Printing from Trixie to a Bookworm installation that is sharing the printer does still work, so it is not the printer driver (or Samba client), per se.
  • Fixed this by installing libcupsimage2 (got that suggestion from a 2020 post, hence we need to archive the Internet!)
• Extrepo seems to be giving me a bunch of problems, unsure if Trixie-related.
  • Removed Extrepo altogether and redid the *.list \ *.sources files, as the Extrepo can't be managed remotely. Turns out needed a new gpg key.
• See also from the Debian upgrade bug tracker.
  • Filed my fix to the printing issue.
• While upgrading various applications, many appear to be not upgradable. However, it really is mostly about the order of upgrading, so we try various ones and eventually everything gets up-to-date. One server couldn't upgrade perl until we removed and installed it again. However, that unfortunately removed mariadb-server as well, which need a reinstallation, after which everything was fine including the current databases.

Note on Backports for Trixie

Currently there are no Backports repositories so including those in sources.list will result in failure to update or upgrade anything. For now, comment them out in the sources.list file. Therefore do the commenting before performing the steps below.

Steps to upgrade to Trixie (Debian 13)

• Official Debian document on upgrades from Debian 12 (Bookworm) to Trixie
• Helpful Gist on upgrading to Trixie

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade --autoremove -y
sudo sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo find /etc/apt/sources.list.d -type f -exec sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' {} \;
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade --autoremove -y
sudo reboot now