Debian Releases
Debian always has at least
three releases in active maintenance: stable
, testing
and
unstable
.
- stable
-
The
stable
distribution contains the latest officially released distribution of Debian.This is the production release of Debian, the one which we primarily recommend using.
The current
stable
distribution of Debian is version 12, codenamed bookworm. It was initially released as version 12.0 on June 10th, 2023 and its latest update, version 12.7, was released on August 31st, 2024. - testing
-
The
testing
distribution contains packages that haven't been accepted into astable
release yet, but they are in the queue for that. The main advantage of using this distribution is that it has more recent versions of software.See the Debian FAQ for more information on what is
testing
and how it becomesstable
.The current
testing
distribution is trixie. - unstable
-
The
unstable
distribution is where active development of Debian occurs. Generally, this distribution is run by developers and those who like to live on the edge. It is recommended that users running unstable should subscribe to the debian-devel-announce mailing list to receive notifications of major changes, for example upgrades that may break.The
unstable
distribution is always called sid.
Release life cycle
Debian announces its new stable release on a regular basis. The Debian release life cycle encompasses five years: the first three years of full support followed by two years of Long Term Support (LTS).
See Debian Releases Wiki page and Debian LTS Wiki page for detailed information.
Index of releases
- The next release of Debian is codenamed
trixie
—testing
— no release date has been set - Debian 12 (
bookworm
) — currentstable
release - Debian 11 (
bullseye
) — currentoldstable
release - Debian 10 (
buster
) — archived release, under third-party paid extended LTS support - Debian 9 (
stretch
) — archived release, under third-party paid extended LTS support - Debian 8 (
jessie
) — archived release, under third-party paid extended LTS support - Debian 7 (
wheezy
) — obsolete stable release - Debian 6.0 (
squeeze
) — obsolete stable release - Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (
lenny
) — obsolete stable release - Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (
etch
) — obsolete stable release - Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (
sarge
) — obsolete stable release - Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (
woody
) — obsolete stable release - Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (
potato
) — obsolete stable release - Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 (
slink
) — obsolete stable release - Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (
hamm
) — obsolete stable release
The web pages for the obsolete Debian releases are kept intact, but the releases themselves can only be found in a separate archive.
See the Debian FAQ for an explanation of where all these codenames came from.
Integrity of the data in the releases
Data integrity is granted by a digitally signed Release
file. To ensure that all files in the release belong to it, checksums of
all Packages
files are copied into the Release
file.
Digital signatures for this file are stored in the file
Release.gpg
, using the current version of the archive signing
key. For stable
and oldstable
an additional signature is
generated using an offline key specifically generated for a release
by a member of the Stable Release Team.