Debian News Archives

Debian 13.5 is out today as the newest point release to Debian Trixie for incorporating all of the latest security fixes affecting the Linux kernel and dozens of user-space packages.

With half-way through the Debian 14 "Forky" development cycle, the Debian release team is out with an update this weekend and some big news.

Sruthi Chandran has been elected the new Debian Project Leader "DPL" after running unopposed in this year's elections.

With age verification/attestation laws down to the OS level enacted by California and being decided upon by other US states, it's been a hot topic of discussion in the open-source world. For the Debian project that is strictly volunteer/community-driven unlike various commercial Linux platforms, they are figuring out how such laws will impact them.

Debian 13.4 rolled out today with dozens of security fixes and other general bug fixes with the updated install media for Debian 13 Trixie.

Announced today was debaudit, a new set of tools and services designed to verify the integrity and reproducibility of Debian source packages.

Debian Project Leader "DPL" Andreas Tille provided an update today on various happenings within the project and personal reflections on some recent topics. Among the topics in today's DPL updates were around AI contributions, Debian's need to become more diverse with its contributors, and needing more "thank yous" to show appreciation for contributions.

Debian's tag2upload has finally reached general availability "GA" status for helping Debian developers/maintainers with an improved Git-based packaging workflow.

LLM scrapers for AI are even hungry for Debian's continuous integration "CI" data. Due to the ongoing abuse of the open web by LLM scrapers, the Debian CI infrastructure is restricting the publicly accessible data with their web server resources being hammered by bots/scrapers.

You may recall the news last month around no one was left on Debian's data protection team and other volunteer staffing challenges with different Debian efforts in the past. Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille has been looking at the issue of the challenges that arise when Debian's all-volunteer developers quietly drift away either due to time commitments, other interests, or other reasons but don't properly communicate it to the Debian project.

Building off this past weekend's Debian 13.3 release is now Debian Libre Live 13.3 images for this derivative that ships the install/live media without any of the non-free firmware assets to remain a free software blessed image.

Debian 13.3 is out today as the newest stable point release for Debian Trixie.

Besides Debian's aging bug tracker interface, another challenge as the Debian Linux distribution project begins 2026 is that all volunteers have left their Data Protection Team. The Debian Data Protection Team deals with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) issues and related data protection/privacy related matters.

Debian's maintainer of the Meson build system package is calling attention to the unfortunate state of Debian's bug tracker in 2026. Editing bug data within Debian's bug tracker still relies on writing custom-formatted emails and submitting them via your mail client. There still is no modern web UI for managing the Debian bug tracker as it was largely written in the early 90s.

Released back in November was Devuan 6.0 for Debian 13 without systemd dependence in order to provide "init freedom" with letting users instead opt for SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system. Devuan 6.1 is out today as the newest stable point release.

Two years and a few months after LoongArch 64-bit "Loong64" was added to Debian Ports, it's now been promoted to being an official architecture for Debian Linux.

Colin Watson announced that Debusine repositories are now available in beta form, which can be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian Linux. This comes down to being similar in nature to Personal Package Archives (PPAs) that are popular with Ubuntu Linux.

Debian 13.2 is out today as the latest maintenance update to this current stable version of Debian GNU/Linux.

The ARMEL and MIPS64EL architectures have been dropped from Debian unstable and experimental. This is the end of the road for these aging ARM and MIPS targets in the Debian world.

Devuan 6.0 "Excalibur" is now available as the fork of Debian GNU/Linux without the use of systemd. Devuan 6.0 is Debian 13 but for "init freedom" lets you use either SysVinit, OpenRC, or Runit as the init system.

Debian developer Julian Andres Klode sent out a message on Halloween that may give some Debian Linux users and developers a spook: the APT packaging tool next year will begin requiring a Rust compiler. This will place a hard requirement by Debian Linux on Rust support for all architectures. Debian CPU architectures with ports currently but lacking Rust support will either need to see support worked on or be sunset.

Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille announced today that their "FTP Master" team is being disbanded and instead establishing the Debian Archive Operations Team "Archive Team" and DFSG, Licensing and New Packages Team "DFSG Team" in its place.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is officially out today as the latest version of this Linux Mint distribution based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu.

Rather than needing to parse package/history log files manually and akin to functionality provided by Red Hat's DNF, a merge request is pending to add a built-in history command for APT.

Following the release of Debian 13.0 "Trixie" nearly one month ago to the day, Debian 13.1 is out today with an initial batch of bug fixes and security updates.

Following this weekend's release of Debian 13.0 "Trixie", Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 has been released as the state of Trixie while running atop Hurd rather than Linux.

Debian 13.0 released yesterday while already Debian developers are beginning to think about Debian 14 as the next major release due out in 2027. Debian 14 is codenamed Forky and among the changes expected is LoongArch64 "Loong64" CPU port support being improved.

Debian 13.0 "Trixie" is now officially out as the newest two-year stable release to Debian GNU/Linux.

While downstream Ubuntu is the most popular Linux option for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered "Windows on Arm" laptops, that's because of their concept images containing a number of "hacked packages" to lead to a decent user experience. But for upstream Debian Linux the prospects of running it on Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptops is less than ideal with a number of problems persisting -- similar to other Linux distributions focused on running the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream software.

At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large.

With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.

The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time.

Debian's annual Debian Conference "DebConf" started this morning and runs all week in Brest, France.

The Debian project is hoping to address challenges of mentoring newcomers to contribute to the Debian Linux distribution as well as making it more known that open-source contributors can do more than just work on Debian packaging but that help is needed for documentation writing, web page creation, sorting out licensing issues, finding project sponsors, and more. Debian is also looking to attain OpenAI sponsorship or open-source funds from other large language model (LLM) / AI providers to help Debian developers for those wanting to use AI to help accelerate their Debian workflows.

Following last month's release of Debian Installer Trixie RC1 as the installer for the upcoming Debian 13.0 release, a second release candidate was issued today for testing.

The Debian project announced on Thursday that AMD has got on-board for being a platinum sponsor of their upcoming DebConf25 developer conference happening in July in Brest, France.

Debian tag2upload reached an open beta state for allowing Debian developers and maintainers to upload by simply using the git-debpush script for pushing a signed Git tag.

Following the release earlier this year of the big APT 3.0 package manager tool release, APT 3.1 was tagged today as another step forward to this key tool on Debian-based Linux distributions.

Debian 13.0 is now one step closer to release with Debian developers having moved Debian "Trixie" into a hard freeze state ahead of the official release this summer.

While Debian 13 is coming soon, for the moment the Debian 12 series remains the latest stable series for this widely-used Linux distribution. Out today is Debian 12.11 that adds in dozens of bug fixes.

Released today is the RC1 version of Debian Installer for Debian 13 "Trixie".

Newly re-elected Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille posted today to the project's mailing list a few updates about different happenings in the Debian world ahead of the Debian 13 "Trixie" release due out in the coming months and also with DebConf 25 happening this July in Brest, France.

The Debian developer community is pursuing a General Resolution for voting on their policy around AI models.

After nearly one and a half decades after the packaging request was made, GNOME Shell Frippery extensions have finally worked their way into Debian via the unstable archive for offering a GNOME2-like desktop experience.

APT 3.0 has been officially released as the first stable version following an interesting development cycle. APT 3.0 has been dedicated to the late Steve Langasek with his many Debian and Ubuntu contributions over the years.

The Debian release team announced that the Debian 13 "Trixie" transition and toolchain freeze began on-schedule this month.

Debian 12.10 is out today as the newest routine media refresh for the Debian 12 "Bookworm" Linux distribution release.

The Debian Policy 4.7.1.0 is now available as the updated manual around policy requirements for the Debian distribution for packaging mandates, design issues, and other details to abide by for Debian developers.

For those wondering whether Debian 13 would see the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop packages given the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" development freezes, it looks like this updated GNOME release will be squeezed in.

With Debian 13 freeze dates announced and that Debian 13.0 "Trixie" release working its way toward release likely around August, it's then to be followed by beginning development on Debian 14 codenamed as "Forky". Yesterday when announcing the Debian Trixie freeze dates, the Debian 15 codename was also announced.