Debian 13 Trixie has been released

Debian 13 Trixie has been released on 2025-08-09 and we want to give you a brief overview and info how to install it or upgrade your Bookworm system.

1. Feature overview
   1.1 Release schedule
   1.2 Available software updates
   1.3 Other notable changes
2. Incompatible software
3. How to apply
   3.1. DietPi Trixie images
   3.2. Upgrade from Bookworm
4. Feedback & Support

1. Feature overview

1.1 Release schedule

Debian does not follow the rolling release model, but is a point release distribution, which provides updates for its distributed software via major releases every two years. The following table gives an overview of the last, current and next stable Debian release:

During these two years, a stable Debian release receives only bug fixes, security patches and in rare cases patch version updates, i.e. updates where the upstream software developer does not declare any breaking changes or new features. You can observe this behavior by looking at the version strings when running apt upgrade: Usually only the suffix changes, indicating that the same software source code version was used. Changes were then limited to the package maintainer/meta files, including bug fix and security patches.
There are some exceptions for this strict update policy, like the Firefox and Chromium web browsers, which receive regular major version updates for security reasons.

This means that once a new Debian version is released, software packages provided by the previous Debian release are about 2 years old. A new Debian release provides hence significant feature updates.

1.2 Available software updates

The following list shows an excerpt of updates available with Debian Trixie for software often used on DietPi systems:

Notable are the PHP and Python upgrades to their respective latest official version, which affects a large number of dietpi-software installation options.

1.3 Other notable changes

1.3.1 64-bit time_t transition

With Debian Trixie, a transition to 64-bit time_t values with the newer time64 syscalls has been done. On 32-bit systems, these time values were only 32 bit long, which makes it impossible for them to represent any time after 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, the so called year 2038 problem. After the transition, these values are 64 bit long, eliminating the issue. The time64 syscalls are available since Linux 5.6, which hence also defines the minimum Linux version needed to support Debian Trixie on 32-bit systems. Additionally, the transition implied renamed library packages, giving them a “t64” suffix. E.g. the libssl3 package is now called libssl3t64, which makes older DEB packages not compiled against the new library incompatible also package-wise. For 64-bit systems, however, nothing changes: time_t values were already 64 bit long before and the “t64” suffix packages formally “provide” the variants without the suffix, which enables compatibility also package-wise. For 64-bit systems, this means the minimum required Linux version remains 4.15, to guarantee regulatory database support without CRDA.

2. Incompatible software

DietPi offers Debian Trixie based images since Debian Bookworm was released, but we did not provide them prominently on our download page or elsewhere until now, hence the number of users has been low so far. To compensate that, systematic tests of all software option in dietpi-software have been performed, assuring that installations go through, services start up, and processes in case listen on the intended network ports: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/wiki/Debian-Trixie-testing

The following list of software titles is known to be not (yet) compatible with Debian Trixie:

• QuiteRSS: Due to outstanding upstream development and maintenance, Debian has removed the package from their repository. This is hence known to not come back, and we will probably remove it from DietPi with the first 2026 release.
• Netdata: Since the project turned commercial, and the web interface is now closed source software, Debian removed it from their repository. We did not yet decide whether we switch to Netdata’s own APT repository, and keep it as software option. Based on information from Debian, the new local web UI lost a lot of features compared to the old open source one, which were moved into Netdata’s cloud platform instead, for which an account is needed, and paid plans to exceed certain limits. If you are interested in Netdata, please join the discussion on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/issues/6929
• UrBackup: Packages for 32-bit ARM and x86_64 depend on old removed libcurl TLS flavors. The developers have been informed already, and compatible packages should be provided soon.
• Medusa: Python 3.13 support is still outstanding: https://github.com/pymedusa/Medusa/pull/11967
• The following software options are not compatible package-wise on 32-bit systems due to the 64-bit time_t transition mentioned above. New package builds for Debian Trixie should solve that issue soon: NAA Daemon, Jellyfin, Moonlight (both versions)

In case you want to use one of the above software titles, you can find up-to-date Debian Bookworm based DietPi images for all platforms here: https://dietpi.com/downloads/images/

3. How to apply

We provide Debian Trixie images as well as a script to upgrade your Debian Bookworm based DietPi system.

3.1 DietPi Trixie images

Trixie images are provided on our download page. You may follow the instruction from our documentation to get DietPi up on your platform.

3.2 Upgrade from Bookworm

We provide a script to upgrade a DietPi Bookworm system to Trixie, as safe as possible. While starting over with a fresh image is generally cleaner, we know that some of you have setups which are time consuming to replicate on a fresh system. Our script warns you if one of the yet incompatible software options is installed on your system, offers to create a backup first, does all known needed migrations and adjustments to have your software running on the new Debian version as before. Execute the following command on your console to start the distribution upgrade:

sudo bash -c "$(curl -sSf 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MichaIng/DietPi/dev/.meta/dietpi-trixie-upgrade')"

Carefully watch the output of the script. If an error occurs, our error handler allows you to open a subshell to investigate and fix the underlying issue, to repeat and continue. After the packages themselves have been upgraded, it allows you to review the output, before continuing with software (config) migrations, which also includes some dietpi-software reinstalls.

Once everything is done, the script offers to do a reboot, which we highly recommend. On first console login as root user after the reboot, old leftover Bookworm APT packages are automatically removed.
In case you run a graphical desktop, just open a terminal emulator and execute sudo -s to finish this step.

4. Feedback & Support

Feel free to leave a comment below for short feedback about this article and how Trixie works for you.

For more detailed test results, and if you face issues with our upgrade script or Trixie in general, please use the following issue on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/issues/7644

Alternatively, you can open a topic in our forum’s troubleshooting section: https://dietpi.com/forum/c/troubleshooting/10

Happy hacking!