Debian 13 is slowly approaching a final stable release, expected to arrive in the next few months. In the meantime, the first release candidate of the Trixie installer is now available. Here’s a look at what’s new.
The base-installer now intelligently excludes *-signed-template kernel packages during kernel selection, reducing clutter and making it easier to choose the right image without accidentally grabbing an unnecessary signature stub.
The debian-cd tooling has seen improved source package management and an updated Debian-edu-full task file, ensuring educational spins remain cohesive. Notably, large graphics firmware packages are omitted from armhf builds, and a smarter exclusion mechanism now filters out firmware that’s either superfluous within the installer or tied to non-free components.
Furthermore, the firmware-sof-signed package’s device list has been refreshed to restore speech synthesis on select hardware.
For the desktop users, if you try out the Trixie installer, you can expect the following environments: Plasma 6.3.4, GNOME 48, or Xfce 4.20. Of course, Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, and LXQt are also available.
Turning to the installer itself, arm64 users will find a bump in SD card image sizes—from 150 MB to 300 MB for netboot, and from 200 MB to 400 MB for netboot-gtk—providing a more comfortable margin for additional udeb modules.
The Linux kernel ABI has been advanced to version 6.12.27, and support for win32-loader has been dropped, streamlining the codebase. In addition, the freshly introduced Ceratopsian theme offers a glimpse of Debian 13’s visual identity.
Under the hood, several utilities have been sharpened. Debian-installer-utils now recognizes persistent memory block devices, while debootstrap avoids pulling in usr-is-merged in trixie/sid environments. Accessibility tool espeakup correctly handles input at startup, and gpgv in gnupg2 sidesteps dependencies on npth and libassuan.
Regarding the bootloader, grub-installer fixes numerous quirks, ranging from incorrect boot device values in grub-pc to more nuanced os-prober logic that no longer inverts supported types or redundantly asks users multiple times.
Additionally, legacy grub support has been removed, and on EFI systems, efibootmgr integration can now dump bootloader configurations for debugging.
Hardware detection has also received thoughtful improvements. Under QEMU/KVM, spice-vdagent is conditionally installed when a desktop environment is detected, and ethdetect now supports commas in module descriptions. Crucially, the detection logic for xhci-pci-renesas firmware avoids risky reloads that could jeopardize the installation medium.
Networking and partitioning components also receive improvements: netcfg now rejects invalid static nameserver entries and correctly applies masklen notation. At the same time, partman-auto reverts ppc64el /boot to ext2 to maintain petitboot compatibility, even outside LVM setups.
Moreover, across various partman modules, default units shift from megabytes to gigabytes, GPT legacy_boot flags gain support, and XFS sees discard and prjquota mount options added. Plus, preliminary rescue functionality for Btrfs subvolumes is already available.
Armhf no longer bundles a PandaBoard u-boot image on the hardware support side, reflecting its upstream removal. Flash-kernel welcomes new targets such as Pine64 Pinebook and MNT Reform 2, and the RPM catalog of supported boards has expanded to include HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, and Microsoft devices.
It’s also worth noting that kernel udebs now incorporate clock modules, various MediaTek drivers, Qualcomm Chromebook modules, and pmem support for UEFI HTTP boots.
Finally, the tzsetup tool modernizes legacy time zones and updates renamed cities. At the same time, user-setup restores non-ASCII full name support thanks to extensive contributions led by Marc Haber and Pascal Hambourg.
For more information on all changes, see the official announcement. If you want to try the installer, download it here.
