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:

  • 64-bit PC (amd64)

  • 64-bit ARM (arm64)

  • ARM EABI (armel)

  • ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf)

  • 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el)

  • 64-bit little-endian RISC-V (riscv64)

  • IBM System z (s390x)

Additionally, on 64-bit PC systems, a partial 32-bit userland (i386) is available. Please see Reduced support for i386 for details.

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

2.2. What’s new in the distribution?

2.2.1. Official support for riscv64

This release for the first time officially supports the riscv64 architecture, allowing users to run Debian on 64-bit RISC-V hardware and benefit from all Debian 13 features.

The Wiki provides more details about riscv64 support in Debian.

2.2.2. PAC/BTI support on arm64

trixie introduces two security features on the arm64 architecture known as Pointer Authentication (PAC) and Branch Target Identification (BTI). They are designed to mitigate Return-Oriented Programming exploits and Jump-Oriented Programming attacks respectively.

The features are enabled automatically if your hardware supports them. The Wiki has information on how to check if your processor supports PAC/BTI and how they work.

2.2.3. HTTP Boot Support

The Debian Installer and Debian Live Images can now be booted using “HTTP Boot” on supported UEFI and U-Boot firmware.

On systems using TianoCore firmware, enter the Device Manager menu, then choose Network Device List, select the network interface, HTTP Boot Configuration, and specify the full URL to the Debian ISO to boot.

For other firmware implementations, please see the documentation for your system’s hardware and/or the firmware documentation.

2.2.4. Desktops and well known packages

This new release of Debian 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.

Debian again ships with several desktop applications and environments. Among others it now includes the desktop environments GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, LXDE 13, LXQt 2.1.0, and Xfce 4.20.

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

  • LibreOffice is upgraded to version 25;

  • GNUcash is upgraded to 5.10;

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

Package

Version in 12 (bookworm)

Version in 13 (trixie)

Apache

2.4.62

2.4.63

Bash

5.2.15

5.2.37

BIND DNS Server

9.18

9.20

Cryptsetup

2.6

2.7

Emacs

28.2

30.1

Exim (default email server)

4.96

4.98

GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection (default compiler)

12.2

14.2

GIMP

2.10.34

3.0.2

GnuPG

2.2.40

2.4.7

Inkscape

1.2.2

1.4

the GNU C library

2.36

2.41

Linux kernel

6.1 series

6.12 series

LLVM/Clang toolchain

13.0.1 and 14.0 (default) and 15.0.6

19 (default), 17 and 18 available

MariaDB

10.11

11.8

Nginx

1.22

1.26

OpenJDK

17

21

OpenLDAP

2.5.13

2.6.9

OpenSSH

9.2p1

10.0p1

OpenSSL

3.0

3.4

Perl

5.36

5.40

PHP

8.2

8.4

Postfix

3.7

3.10

PostgreSQL

15

17

Python 3

3.11

3.13

Rustc

1.63

1.85

Samba

4.17

4.22

Systemd

252

257

Vim

9.0

9.1