2. What's new in Debian 13

The Wiki has more information about this topic.

2.1. Supported architectures

The following are the officially supported architectures for Debian 13:

  • 32-bit PC (i386) and 64-bit PC (amd64)

  • 64-bit ARM (arm64)

  • ARM EABI (armel)

  • ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf)

  • little-endian MIPS (mipsel)

  • 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el)

  • 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el)

  • IBM System z (s390x)

Baseline bump for 32-bit PC to i686

The 32-bit PC support (known as the Debian architecture i386) now requires the "long NOP" instruction. Please refer to Baseline for 32-bit PC is now i686 for more information.

You can read more about port status, and port-specific information for your architecture at the Debian port web pages.

2.2. Archive areas

The following archive areas, mentioned in the Social Contract and in the Debian Policy, have been around for a long time:

  • main: the Debian distribution;

  • contrib: supplemental packages intended to work with the Debian distribution, but which require software outside of the distribution to either build or function;

  • non-free: supplemental packages intended to work with the Debian distribution that do not comply with the DFSG or have other problems that make their distribution problematic.

Following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware, the 5th point of the Social Contract was extended with the following sentence:

The Debian official media may include firmware that is otherwise not part of the Debian system to enable use of Debian with hardware that requires such firmware.

While it's not mentioned explicitly in either the Social Contract or Debian Policy yet, a new archive area was introduced, making it possible to separate non-free firmware from the other non-free packages:

  • non-free-firmware

Most non-free firmware packages have been moved from non-free to non-free-firmware in preparation for the Debian 13 release. This clean separation makes it possible to build official installation images with packages from main and from non-free-firmware, without contrib or non-free. In turn, these installation images make it possible to install systems with only main and non-free-firmware, without contrib or non-free.

See The non-free and non-free-firmware components for upgrades from bookworm.

2.3. What's new in the distribution?

This new release of Debian again comes with a lot more software than its predecessor bookworm; the distribution includes over 11294 new packages, for a total of over 59551 packages. Most of the software in the distribution has been updated: over 42821 software packages (this is 72% of all packages in bookworm). Also, a significant number of packages (over 9519, 16% of the packages in bookworm) have for various reasons been removed from the distribution. You will not see any updates for these packages and they will be marked as "obsolete" in package management front-ends; see Obsolete packages.

2.3.1. Desktops and well known packages

Debian again ships with several desktop applications and environments. Among others it now includes the desktop environments GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, and Xfce 4.18.

Productivity applications have also been upgraded, including the office suites:

  • LibreOffice is upgraded to version 7.4;

  • GNUcash is upgraded to 4.13;

Among many others, this release also includes the following software updates:

Package

Version in 12 (bookworm)

Version in 13 (trixie)

Apache

2.4.54

2.4.57

Bash

5.1

5.2.15

BIND DNS Server

9.16

9.18

Cryptsetup

2.3

2.6

Emacs

27.1

28.2

Exim default e-mail server

4.94

4.96

GNU Compiler Collection as default compiler

10.2

12.2

GIMP

2.10.22

2.10.34

GnuPG

2.2.27

2.2.40

Inkscape

1.0.2

1.2.2

the GNU C library

2.31

2.36

Linux kernel image

5.10 series

6.1 series

LLVM/Clang toolchain

9.0.1 and 11.0.1 (default) and 13.0.1

13.0.1 and 14.0 (default) and 15.0.6

MariaDB

10.5

10.11

Nginx

1.18

1.22

OpenJDK

11

17

OpenLDAP

2.4.57

2.5.13

OpenSSH

8.4p1

9.2p1

OpenSSL

1.1.1n

3.0.8

Perl

5.32

5.36

PHP

7.4

8.2

Postfix MTA

3.5

3.7

PostgreSQL

13

15

Python 3

3.9.2

3.11.2

Rustc

1.48

1.63

Samba

4.13

4.17

Systemd

247

252

Vim

8.2

9.0

2.3.2. More translated man pages

Thanks to our translators, more documentation in man-page format is available in more languages than ever. For example, many man pages are now available in Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, and all systemd man pages are now available in German.

To ensure the man command shows the documentation in your language (where possible), install the right manpages-lang package and make sure your locale is correctly configured by using

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

.

2.3.3. News from Debian Med Blend

As in every release new packages have been added in the fields of medicine and life sciences. The new package shiny-server might be worth a particular mention, since it simplifies scientific web applications using R. We also kept up the effort to provide Continuous Integration support for the packages maintained by the Debian Med team.

The Debian Med team is always interested in feedback from users, especially in the form of requests for packaging of not-yet-packaged free software, or for backports from new packages or higher versions in testing.

To install packages maintained by the Debian Med team, install the metapackages named med-*, which are at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm. Feel free to visit the Debian Med tasks pages to see the full range of biological and medical software available in Debian.

2.3.4. News from Debian Astro Blend

Debian bookworm comes with version 4.0 of the Debian Astro Pure Blend, which continues to represent a great one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts and everyone who is interested in astronomy. Almost all packages in Debian Astro were updated to new versions, but there are also several new software packages.

For radio astronomers, the open source correlator openvlbi is now included. The new packages astap and planetary-system-stacker are useful for image stacking and astrometry resolution. A large number of new drivers and libraries supporting the INDI protocol were packaged and are now shipped with Debian.

The new Astropy affiliated packages python3-extinction, python3-sncosmo, python3-specreduce, and python3-synphot are included, as well as packages created around python3-yt and python3-sunpy. Python support for the ASDF file format is much extended, while the Java ecosystem is extended with libraries handling the ECSV and TFCAT file formats, primarily for use with topcat.

Check the Astro Blend page for a complete list and further information.

2.3.5. Secure Boot on ARM64

Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced in trixie. Users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled and take full advantage of the security feature. Ensure that the packages grub-efi-arm64-signed and shim-signed are installed, enable Secure Boot in the firmware interface of your device and reboot to use your system with Secure Boot enabled.

The Wiki has more information on how to use and debug Secure Boot.