A little over two months after Debian 13 “Trixie” made its debut, the Mobian team has now followed suit with the release of Mobian Trixie, marking the project’s new stable branch of its Debian-based mobile Linux OS. Alongside the release, the team also announced the start of a PGP/GPG key rotation for signing its images and package repositories.
Over two years in development, this release brings an updated base aligned with Debian 13, Phosh 46.0, and Plasma Mobile 6.3 desktop environments, as well as a Linux kernel 6.12 kernel for most supported devices. The Librem 5 remains on kernel 6.6 for now.
Mobian Trixie provides fresh, stable images for several popular devices, including the PINE64 PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, PineTab, Purism Librem 5, Google Pixel 3a/3a XL, OnePlus 6/6T, and Xiaomi Pocophone F1. Experimental builds are also available for the Fairphone 4 and 5, PineTab 2, and SHIFT6mq, though some hardware features, such as Wi-Fi or audio, may not yet work properly.
As usual, users are encouraged to flash a fresh image rather than upgrade in place. The Mobian team notes that while upgrades are possible, they can be complicated due to fast-moving changes in the mobile stack.
Anyone attempting a manual upgrade should back up all personal data, ensure their device is fully updated under Bookworm, and perform the migration to Trixie with care — ideally over SSH using tools like screen to prevent interruptions.
The release also marks a transition to PipeWire as the default and required audio system, replacing PulseAudio entirely.
For users who prefer full-disk encryption, installer images are still unavailable. Despite this, Mobian offers a manual method via its mobian-recipes repository that allows generating encrypted Trixie images for supported devices.
On the security side, Mobian is beginning a long-planned rotation of its GPG keys, which are used to sign both images and package archives. While Trixie continues to use the current signing key for now, four new keys have been generated — one each for the forky, staging, and trixie repositories, plus one dedicated to image signing. The latter went into use on October 12.
Users may need to update to the latest mobian-archive-keyring package (version 20251011.0 or later) to avoid verification errors when fetching updates. The team recommends checking the Matrix channel for assistance if issues persist.
For more information, see the announcement.
