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. Hardening against ROP and COP/JOP attacks on amd64 and arm64
trixie introduces security features on the amd64 and arm64 architectures designed to mitigate Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) exploits and Call/Jump-Oriented Programming (COP/JOP) attacks.
On amd64 this is based on Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) for both ROP and COP/JOP protection, on arm64 it is based on Pointer Authentication (PAC) for ROP protection and Branch Target Identification (BTI) for COP/JOP protection.
The features are enabled automatically if your hardware supports them. For amd64 see the Linux kernel documentation and the Intel documentation, and for arm64 see the Wiki, and the Arm documentation, which have information on how to check if your processor supports CET and 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 |