Debian 13 “Trixie” is set to launch around mid-year, and the developers have already shared the freeze schedule, which kicks off in mid-March.
As expected, there’s a lot of anticipation surrounding this release, given that the distro serves as the backbone for many others, shaping their foundation for the next two years.
One of the biggest points of excitement is the desktop environment versions that Debian 13 will include. And for GNOME fans, there’s great news—Debian 13 will feature the latest GNOME 48, which is scheduled for release on March 19th.
Jeremy Bicha, a Canonical Desktop Software Engineer and Debian Developer shared the news in a post on the Ubuntu Discourse forums.
After discussion with the rest of the Debian GNOME team, we decided to target GNOME 48 for Debian 13 “Trixie”. Our goal is to get GNOME 48 RC 21 in before Debian’s Transition Freeze 22 and 48.1 in before Debian’s Hard Freeze.
GNOME 48 will introduce many updates and enhancements throughout its core applications, shell, and underlying technologies. Here are the main ones:
- Screen Time support: A new feature allowing users or administrators to set usage limits and view activity statistics directly from GNOME Shell.
- Wayland improvements: Mutter, GNOME’s window manager, includes new timing and queuing protocols to improve Wayland’s performance and responsiveness.
- Decibels as the new official audio player: This dedicated GNOME audio player aims to provide an intuitive, streamlined music-listening experience.
- GNOME Snapshot (Screenshot) gains QR code reading: Besides capturing and editing screenshots, Snapshot can recognize and process QR codes.
- GNOME Image Viewer editing tools: Users can now make quick image edits (e.g., cropping, rotating, or simple adjustments) directly in the default image viewer.
- GNOME Control Center power improvements: The power settings now provide clearer battery usage information, power profiles, and additional configuration options.
- GNOME Remote Desktop: Prepares for next-generation rendering and hardware acceleration via Vulkan and VA-API, improving performance for remote sessions.
- Nautilus performance boosts: Notably faster thumbnail loading and general performance improvements when browsing files and folders.
Regarding the other major desktop environment, KDE, Debian 13 is expected to launch with Plasma 6. However, there’s no official word yet on which specific version will be included in the final stable release. As always, we’ll be among the first to let you know as soon as there’s more concrete information.
