I was hoping for a review from a server perspective. That's where Debian shines in my opinion. I feel like the desktop part is a secondary priority for them. That's not a criticism, there's no other distribution I would use in production if it where my choice. On the desktop though they are a bit too stable. Even if one uses testing or unstable the focus on long term versions is still there.
Installed trixie a few days ago and test driving it and it's been going very well. Coming from Ubuntu so it wasn't a big change but initially I went with Ubuntu many years ago due to its reputation in making Debian a more user-friendly distribution. I can say that my experience with trixie was quite friendly. This may have been the case for a few releases but I was invested in the Ubuntu platform so didn't see the need to switch.
Was bummed to see firefox at version 128 as I've been missing features from the more recent versions. I don't know how I'm going to address that yet as I prefer not to add external apt sources, if I can. This is on a desktop system so somewhat recent versions of software is desirable.
What do other people do for desktop systems? Go with testing/unstable or just another distro for desktops?
Back when I wanted new packages, I ran Debian unstable.
Occasionally I'd find myself having to manually fix dependencies, but for the most part it worked great for me. I don't bother now, since it's rare that I want something newer than what backports can give me and I'm not adverse to compiling my own stuff if I need to.
> Truly adventurous users may take their chances with the unstable ("sid") release.
been running "unstable" since 2007 as my daily driver, work-horse, dev-machine, ... Not once faced a "problem" I couldn't recover from. Not once a restore from backup of the main OS due to something the upgrade or OS had caused, no booting from a rescue-image. For something that comes without warranty and has "unstable" in it's name, it's pretty solid.
Apples and oranges of course, but it holds up also well compared to Windows (which tbf, has gotten more stable since Win98), or even compared to MacOS that also crashes at times even after version MacOS 9.x (which was when MacOS became usable in the sense of "stability").
The biggest problem with Debian 13 is not with Debian, it's with people like Google and Cloudflare.
Come on guys, Debian 13 has been in testing for months, and you can't be arsed to update your apt repos from bookworm to trixie by release, or even weeks after release? That's embarrassing.
~ sudo apt update --audit
[...]
Hit:8 https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-bookworm-stable InRelease
Hit:10 https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk-bookworm InRelease
Hit:11 https://pkg.cloudflareclient.com bookworm InRelease
Hit:12 https://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflared bookworm InRelease
[...]
Fetched 407 kB in 2s (222 kB/s)
2 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.
Warning: https://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflared/dists/any/InRelease: Policy will reject signature within a year, see --audit for details
Audit: https://pkg.cloudflare.com/cloudflared/dists/any/InRelease: Sub-process /usr/bin/sqv returned an error code (1), error message is:
Signing key on FBA8C0EE63617C5EED695C43254B391D8CACCBF8 is not bound:
No binding signature at time 2025-08-21T15:58:52Z
because: Policy rejected non-revocation signature (PositiveCertification) requiring second pre-image resistance
because: SHA1 is not considered secure since 2026-02-01T00:00:00Z
These apt repos are still bookworm-only after the trixie release, and it's been weeks. And Cloudflare is still stuck on SHA1.
While being an avid Debian user on both server and desktop, I had never heard of the Extrepo[0] package mentioned in the article. It would be great if the repositories included in there would suggest this way of adding their repo. While it cannot guarantee the safety of added packages, it at least add an extra layer of checks.
Another useful thing from the article for me was `apt modernize-sources` to update the existing sources.list to the new structure. Now I need to check if scripts like this run automatically on my auto-updating desktop from my parents.
Is this really a big deal on effectively single user systems with in-person hardware? On the other hand, why is this such a hard decision for Debian to make?
No mention of backports in this article as an alternative to tracking testing if you want (some) newer packages.
The Libreoffice 5.8 (which was just released very recently) is already packaged in backports for trixie for instance. Did things like updated KDE desktops make it to backports for bookworm?
I love Debian, but it does have some weaknesses. For example with virtualization, when you enable SR-IOV, apparmor goes bananas. With AlmaLinux + SELinux there are no problems. I use both Debian and AlmaLinux on my servers, and with that combo I feel I get the best of the best. But I think AlmaLinux is more polished and that SELinux is superior to apparmor.
> Even better, there is a little-advertised utility called extrepo that has a curated list of external repositories users might want to enable for Debian. To enable the Mozilla repository, for example, a user only needs to install extrepo, run "extrepo enable mozilla" as root (or with sudo), update the package cache, and look for the regular Firefox package. In all, extrepo includes more than 160 external repositories for applications like Docker CE, Signal, and Syncthing. Unfortunately, the extrepo utility does not have a separate "list" command to show the available repositories, though running "extrepo search" with no search parameter will return all of its DEB822-formatted repository entries.
Trixie has been great except for the proprietary nvidia driver. The upgraded 550 driver has known problems with 4k @ 120hz that causes crazy flickering [1].
I tried the 580 bundle with the same problem. I had to revert to the 535 bundle.
I've been running trixie for a few weeks now and it's been solid, great release so far.
One of the features I'm most excited about is access to Podman 5.4.2, and the ability to use Podman Quadlets. It'll be nice to start transitioning my systemd service units over to the new format for my containers.
> Truly adventurous users may take their chances with the unstable ("sid") release.
It's been years since I've run Linux as a daily driver, but when I did it was Sid, and it didn't feel particularly adventurous. Over a 10-15 years timespan, I think there were 2 breakages, one of them being the difficult KDE 3.x transition.
I've long meant to try Fedora, but apt/dpkg is in my muscle memory, and I never got the handle of dnf/rpm.
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[ 67.6 ms ] story [ 355 ms ] threadWas bummed to see firefox at version 128 as I've been missing features from the more recent versions. I don't know how I'm going to address that yet as I prefer not to add external apt sources, if I can. This is on a desktop system so somewhat recent versions of software is desirable.
What do other people do for desktop systems? Go with testing/unstable or just another distro for desktops?
Occasionally I'd find myself having to manually fix dependencies, but for the most part it worked great for me. I don't bother now, since it's rare that I want something newer than what backports can give me and I'm not adverse to compiling my own stuff if I need to.
been running "unstable" since 2007 as my daily driver, work-horse, dev-machine, ... Not once faced a "problem" I couldn't recover from. Not once a restore from backup of the main OS due to something the upgrade or OS had caused, no booting from a rescue-image. For something that comes without warranty and has "unstable" in it's name, it's pretty solid.
Apples and oranges of course, but it holds up also well compared to Windows (which tbf, has gotten more stable since Win98), or even compared to MacOS that also crashes at times even after version MacOS 9.x (which was when MacOS became usable in the sense of "stability").
Come on guys, Debian 13 has been in testing for months, and you can't be arsed to update your apt repos from bookworm to trixie by release, or even weeks after release? That's embarrassing.
These apt repos are still bookworm-only after the trixie release, and it's been weeks. And Cloudflare is still stuck on SHA1.Another useful thing from the article for me was `apt modernize-sources` to update the existing sources.list to the new structure. Now I need to check if scripts like this run automatically on my auto-updating desktop from my parents.
[0]: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/extrepo
Would it really be so hard to make that switch to a more privacy focused umask?
The Libreoffice 5.8 (which was just released very recently) is already packaged in backports for trixie for instance. Did things like updated KDE desktops make it to backports for bookworm?
TIL. What a superpower!
I tried the 580 bundle with the same problem. I had to revert to the 535 bundle.
[1]: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/nvidia-555-58-4k-120hz...
One of the features I'm most excited about is access to Podman 5.4.2, and the ability to use Podman Quadlets. It'll be nice to start transitioning my systemd service units over to the new format for my containers.
> Truly adventurous users may take their chances with the unstable ("sid") release.
It's been years since I've run Linux as a daily driver, but when I did it was Sid, and it didn't feel particularly adventurous. Over a 10-15 years timespan, I think there were 2 breakages, one of them being the difficult KDE 3.x transition.
I've long meant to try Fedora, but apt/dpkg is in my muscle memory, and I never got the handle of dnf/rpm.