2. What’s new in Debian 13 — release-notes documentation

2. What’s new in Debian 13 — release-notes documentation
2.
What’s new in Debian 13
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2.
What’s new in Debian 13
The
Wiki
has more information about this
topic.
2.1.
Supported architectures
The following are the officially supported architectures for Debian
13:
64-bit PC (
amd64
64-bit ARM (
arm64
ARM EABI (
armel
ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI,
armhf
64-bit little-endian PowerPC (
ppc64el
64-bit little-endian RISC-V (
riscv64
IBM System z (
s390x
Additionally, on 64-bit PC systems, a partial 32-bit userland (
i386
is available. Please see
Reduced support for i386
for details.
See
Last release for armel
for limitations on support for the ARM EABI
armel
) architecture.
You can read more about port status, and port-specific information for
your architecture at the
Debian port web pages
2.2.
What’s new in the distribution?
2.2.1.
Official support for riscv64
This release for the first time officially supports the riscv64
architecture, allowing users to run Debian on 64-bit RISC-V hardware
and benefit from all Debian 13 features.
The
Wiki
provides more details
about riscv64 support in Debian.
2.2.2.
Hardening against ROP and COP/JOP attacks on arm64
trixie introduces security features on the arm64
architecture designed to mitigate
Return-Oriented Programming (ROP)
exploits and Call/Jump-Oriented Programming (COP/JOP) attacks.
These features are based on Pointer Authentication (PAC) for ROP protection
and Branch Target Identification (BTI) for COP/JOP protection,
and are enabled automatically if your hardware supports them.
See the
Wiki
and the
Arm documentation
which have information on how to check if your processor supports PAC/BTI
and how they work.
2.2.3.
HTTP Boot Support
The Debian Installer and Debian Live Images can now be booted using “HTTP Boot” on
supported UEFI and U-Boot firmware.
On systems using
TianoCore
firmware, enter the
Device Manager
menu, then choose
Network Device List
, select the network
interface,
HTTP Boot Configuration
, and specify the full URL to the Debian ISO
to boot.
For other firmware implementations, please see the documentation for your system’s hardware
and/or the firmware documentation.
2.2.4.
Improved manual pages translations
The
manpages-l10n
project has contributed many improved and new translations
for manual pages. Especially Romanian and Polish translations are greatly enhanced
since bookworm.
2.2.5.
Spell-checking support in Qt WebEngine web browsers
Web browsers based on Qt WebEngine, notably Privacy Browser and Falkon, now
support spell-checking using
hunspell
data. The data is available in the
BDIC
binary
dictionary
format shipping in each Hunspell language package for
the first time in Trixie.
More information is available in the related
bug report
2.2.6.
64-bit time_t ABI transition
All architectures other than
i386
now use a 64-bit
time_t
ABI, supporting
dates beyond 2038.
On 32-bit architectures (
armel
and
armhf
) the ABI of many libraries
changed without changing the library “soname”. On these architectures, third-party
software and packages will need to be recompiled/rebuilt, and checked for possibly
silent data loss.
The
i386
architecture did not participate in this transition, since its
primary function is to support legacy software.
More details can be found on the
Debian wiki
2.2.7.
Debian progress towards reproducible builds
Debian contributors have made significant progress toward ensuring package
builds produce byte-for-byte reproducible results. You can check the status for
packages installed on your system using the new package
debian-repro-status
or visit
reproduce.debian.net
for Debian’s overall statistics for trixie and later.
You can contribute to these efforts by joining
#debian-reproducible
on IRC
to discuss fixes, or verify the statistics by installing the new
rebuilderd
package and setting up your own instance.
2.2.8.
wcurl and HTTP/3 support in curl
Both the curl CLI and libcurl now have support for HTTP/3.
HTTP/3 requests can be made with the flags
--http3
or
--http3-only
The
curl
package now ships wcurl, a wget alternative that uses curl to
perform downloads.
Downloading files is as simple as
wcurl
URL
2.2.9.
BDIC Binary Hunspell Dictionary Support
Trixie ships .bdic binary dictionaries compiled from Hunspell source for the
first time in Debian. The .bdic format was developed by Google for use in
Chromium. It can be used by Qt WebEngine, which is derived from Chromium’s
source. Web browsers based on Qt WebEngine can take advantage of the provided
.bdic dictionaries if they have appropriate upstream support. More information
is available in the related
bug report
2.2.10.
Desktops and well known packages
This new release of Debian comes with a lot more software than its predecessor
bookworm; the distribution includes over 14116 new packages,
for a total of over 69830 packages. Most of the software in the
distribution has been updated: over 44326 software packages (this
is 63% of all packages in bookworm). Also, a
significant number of packages (over 8844,
12% of the packages in bookworm) have for
various reasons been removed from the distribution. You will not see any
updates for these packages and they will be marked as “obsolete” in package
management front-ends; see
Obsolete packages
Debian again ships with several desktop applications and environments.
Among others it now includes the desktop environments GNOME 48, KDE
Plasma 6.3, LXDE 13, LXQt 2.1.0, and Xfce 4.20.
Productivity applications have also been upgraded, including the office
suites:
LibreOffice is upgraded to version 25;
GNUcash is upgraded to 5.10;
Among many others, this release also includes the following software
updates:
Package
Version in
12
(bookworm)
Version in 13
(trixie)
Apache
2.4.62
2.4.65
Bash
5.2.15
5.2.37
BIND DNS Server
9.18
9.20
Cryptsetup
2.6
2.7
curl/libcurl
7.88.1
8.14.1
Emacs
28.2
30.1
Exim (default
email server)
4.96
4.98
GCC, the GNU Compiler
Collection
(default compiler)
12.2
14.2
GIMP
2.10.34
3.0.4
GnuPG
2.2.40
2.4.7
Inkscape
1.2.2
1.4
the GNU C library
2.36
2.41
Linux kernel
6.1 series
6.12 series
LLVM/Clang toolchain
13.0.1 and 14.0
(default) and 15.0.6
19 (default), 17 and
18 available
MariaDB
10.11
11.8
Nginx
1.22
1.26
OpenJDK
17
21
OpenLDAP
2.5.13
2.6.10
OpenSSH
9.2p1
10.0p1
OpenSSL
3.0
3.5
Perl
5.36
5.40
PHP
8.2
8.4
Postfix
3.7
3.10
PostgreSQL
15
17
Python 3
3.11
3.13
Qt 5
5.15.8
5.15.15
Qt 6
6.4.2
6.8.2
Rustc
1.63
1.85
Samba
4.17
4.22
Systemd
252
257
Vim
9.0
9.1
2.2.11.
Plasma 6
Debian 13 will be the first release of Debian shipping Plasma 6. This is
a major upgrade from Plasma 5 found in Debian 12 and is built on an
entirely new stack based on Qt 6 and KDE Framework 6 libraries.
Debian 13 (trixie) ships:
Qt 6.8.2 (up from 6.4.2)
KDE Frameworks 6.13 (new)
Plasma 6.3.6 (replaces Plasma 5.27.5)
KDE Gear applications:
KDE PIM suite in version 24.12.3
Other Gear applications in version 25.04.3 (except Neochat, KDevelop, Partition Manager)
The details of all packages added and removed in the stack between Debian
12 and 13 can be found in the
Trixie Release Plans
wiki page of the Qt / KDE Team.
In place upgrades of user profiles are generally supported but some
occasional issues have been reported. Issues that could not be fixed in the
distribution are being tracked in the
Plasma 6 Upgrade Quirks
wiki page alongside their workarounds.
For compatibilty with existing applications, Debian 13 also ships:
Qt 5.15.15 (up from 5.15.8)
KDE Frameworks 5.116 (up from 5.103)
Krita and a few other applications still depend on KDE Frameworks 5 but KF5 are
not developed anymore and are considered deprecated upstream. They will be
removed during the forky development cycle.