On the last day of 2024, Debian unveils the installer’s inaugural alpha release for the upcoming Debian 13 “Trixie” release.
Regarding hardware support, armel, and i386 remain in the Debian archive but will no longer have dedicated installer builds. The mipsel architecture, removed from the archive last year, is also absent from this installer, while riscv64 steps into the spotlight as a brand-new architecture.
Another change that users will appreciate is the introduction of the new Ceratopsian theme, although the final updates to the boot screens are still underway.
Meanwhile, the user-setup screens, responsible for creating the root user and the first regular user, have received an overdue makeover and now deliver a more straightforward and visually pleasing experience.
The installer’s partitioning components have also improved, including better heuristics for automatic partitioning—such as more accurate calculation of swap size—and recipes tailored for smaller disks, collectively making Debian’s installation more versatile.
From a localization standpoint, this alpha release supports 78 languages, and 18 now have full translations.
However, despite all the progress, referring to the devs, there are still a few known bugs, partly due to some large packages making it tricky to build images for source packages.
Nonetheless, the team believes that releasing this alpha version now is essential for gathering community feedback and ironing out remaining issues.
For more information, see the announcement. The ISO images are available for download here, so grab them to get first-hand impressions on the new Trixie installer.
