Debian 13 (Trixie) Is Just Around the Corner

[Gerowen]

I've written a Substack article where I talk about the expected release date for Debian 13 (August 9th) and cover some of the upcoming changes that will either affect me personally, or that I thought noteworthy.  You can read the whole thing here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/gerowen/p/debian-gnulinux-13-trixie-is-just?r=54rcsd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

It's rather long and has several images that would probably exceed the attachment limit, but I'll copy and paste the first little bit of it here:

Quote

So while perusing the internet earlier I came across a message on the debian-devel-announce mailing list suggesting an expected release date for the next major version of Debian 13, codename Trixie.

I’ve been watching for any kind of news or announcement on this front for a while because every computer in my house runs Debian, including two homelab servers, and while I mostly have the summers off work, I go back to working full time in August. So between planning the time to actually do all the upgrades, I also wanted to be able to warn friends and family that use my Minecraft, Nextcloud and other services ahead of time that the server will be down for an extended period of time.

Unlike point releases that happen every month or two with security rollups and such, this update constitutes an entirely new version of the Debian operating system. That means some software is going to be marked as “obsolete”, some will just get straight up removed, the behavior of some software, or even the operating system itself, might change with the updates, etc. This is why Debian is so stable. They backport security updates to their software over the entire supported life of a Debian release, but new behavior and new major versions of most software don’t get shipped until there’s a new major release of Debian, at least without some manual intervention from the user to source newer software from elsewhere, like stable backports. This prevents unexpected changes in behavior over the life of a release and it means that you can feel reasonably safe installing updates from Debian without worrying about it breaking anything.