A screenshot of Debian 10 (Buster) with the GNOME desktop environment version 3
Debian is a free and open-source operating system developed based on Linux. It is one of the oldest and most important Linux distributions and serves as the base for many other distributions. With one of the largest and most active communities in FOSS software, Debian is constantly being updated and improved by its developers. Major releases are made around every two years by the Debian Project although
Debian releases do not follow a fixed schedule. The most recent version of Debian is Debian version 13, codename "Trixie".[1] The next up and coming release of Debian is Debian 14, codename "Forky".
Debian always has at least three active branches at any time: "stable", "testing" and "unstable".[2] The stable branch is considered the primary release and what most people refer to when talking about Debian. The testing branch contains packages that have been imported from unstable. Testing has significantly more up-to-date packages than stable and is frozen some time before a release to become the next version of Debian. The unstable release (also known as Sid) is the branch where active development takes place. It is the most volatile version of Debian.
When the Debian stable branch is replaced with a newer release, the current stable becomes an "oldstable" release. When the Debian stable branch is replaced again, the oldstable release becomes the "oldoldstable" release. Oldoldstable is eventually moved to the archived releases repository.[3]
Naming convention
Debian distribution codenames are based on the names of characters from the Toy Story franchise. Debian's unstablebranch is named after Sid, a character who regularly destroyed his toys.[4]
Release cycle
Debian Unstable, known as "Sid", contains all the latest packages as soon as they are available. It is not officially considered a release, but a development staging environment. To avoid confusion with rolling-release distributions, the Debian wiki describes Sid as a "rolling development" branch, which isn't intended for normal use and doesn't offer quality assurance or integration testing.[5]
Once a package has been in Debian Unstable for 2–10 days (depending on the urgency of the upload), doesn't introduce critical bugs and doesn't break other packages (among other conditions), it is included in Debian Testing, also known as "next-stable".[6]
On average about every two years, Debian Testing enters a "freeze" cycle, where new packages are held back unless they fix critical bugs.[7][8] This frozen state lasts on average 7 months (but can be as short as one month).[7] Once Debian Testing doesn't contain any more release critical bugs, it is declared "stable" and released with a version number.[8]
↑Extended long-term support (ELTS) is provided by Freexian to subscribers.[9] There is no kernel support, and only sponsored packages are supported.[10]
When a release transitions to long-term support phase (LTS-phase), security is no longer handled by the main Debian security team.[101] Only a subset of Debian architectures are eligible for Long Term Support, and there is no support for packages in backports.[102]
Release history
Debian 1.0 was never released, as a vendor accidentally shipped a development release with that version number.[103]
The package management system dpkg and its front-end dselect were developed and implemented on Debian in a previous release. A transition from the a.out binary format to the ELF binary format had already begun before the planned 1.0 release. The only supported architecture was Intel 80386 (i386).[11]
Debian 1.1 (Buzz)
Debian 1.1 (Buzz), released 17 June 1996, contained 474 packages. Debian had fully transitioned to the ELF binary format and used Linux kernel 2.0.[104]
Debian 1.2 (Rex)
Debian 1.2 (Rex), released 12 December 1996, contained 848 packages maintained by 120 developers.[105]
Debian 2.0 (Hamm), released 24 July 1998, contained over 1,500 packages maintained by over 400 developers. A transition was made to libc6 and Debian was ported to the Motorola 68000 series (m68k) architectures.[109]
Debian 2.1 (Slink) running a very early version of GNOME
Debian 2.1 (Slink), released 9 March 1999,[111] contained about 2,250 packages. The front-end APT was introduced for the package management system and Debian was ported to Alpha and SPARC.[112][20]
Debian 3.0 (Woody), released 19 July 2002, contained around 8,500 packages maintained by more than 900 developers. KDE was introduced and Debian was ported to the following architectures: IA-64, PA-RISC (hppa), mips and mipsel and IBM ESA/390 (s390).[126][24][25]
Debian 3.1 (Sarge), released 6 June 2005, contained around 15,400 packages. debian-installer, OpenOffice.org and GNOME 2.8 were introduced.[133][27]
Point releases:
3.1r8 (13April 2008(2008-04-13)) this is the final update for codename Sarge.[148][149]
Debian 4.0 (Etch)
Debian 4.0 (Etch)
Debian 4.0 (Etch), released 8 April 2007, contained around 18,000 packages maintained by more than 1,030 developers. Debian was ported to x86-64 (amd64) and support for the Motorola 68000 series (m68k) architecture was dropped.[150][29] This version introduced UTF-8 and udev device management by default.
4.0r9 (22May 2010(2010-05-22)) this is the final update for codename Etch[167][168]
Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
Debian 5.0 (Lenny), released 14 February 2009, contained more than 23,000 packages. Debian was ported to the ARM EABI (armel) architecture.[169][31][32]
5.0.10 (10March 2012(2012-03-10)) this is the final update for codename Lenny.[185]
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) in Spanish
Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), released 6 February 2011, contained more than 29,000 packages. The default Linux kernel included was deblobbed beginning with this release. The web browser Chromium was introduced and Debian was ported to the kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 architectures (while that port was later discontinued), and support for the Intel 486, Alpha, and PA-RISC (hppa) architectures was dropped.[186][187][33][34]
Squeeze was the first release of Debian in which non-free firmware components (aka "binary blobs") were excluded from the "main" repository as a matter of policy.[188][189][190][191]
Wheezy long term support reached end-of-life (1June 2018(2018-06-01))[216]
Wheezy extended long term support reached end-of-life (30June 2020(2020-06-30)).[217]
Debian 8 (Jessie)
Debian 8 (Jessie)
Debian 8 (Jessie), released 25 April 2015, contained more than 43,000 packages, with systemd installed by default instead of init. (sysvinit and upstart packages were provided as alternatives.) But the use of systemd provoked a handful of Debian developers to fork the project leading to the creation of Devuan, a systemd-free fork of Debian, giving users the choice of using other init systems like sysvinit, runit or OpenRC with the stability of the core Debian project.[218] Debian was ported to the ARM64 and ppc64le architectures, while support for the IA-64, kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386, IBM ESA/390 (s390) (only the 31-bit variant; the newer 64-bits390x was retained) and SPARC architectures were dropped.[219][220][42]
Jessie long term support reached end-of-life (30June 2020(2020-06-30))[216]
Jessie extended long term support reached end-of-life (30June 2025(2025-06-30))[217]
Debian 9 (Stretch)
Debian 9 (Stretch) with GNOME
Debian 9 (Stretch) was released on 17 June 2017, two years and two months after Debian 8.0, and contained more than 51,000 packages.[44] The final minor update, called a "point release", is version 9.13,[233] released on 18July 2020(2020-07-18). Major upgrades include the Linux kernel going from version 3.16 to 4.9, GNOME desktop version going from 3.14 to 3.22, KDE Plasma 4 was upgraded to Plasma 5, LibreOffice 4.3 upgraded to 5.2 and Qt upgraded from 4.8 to 5.7. LXQt has been added as well.
9.13 (18July 2020(2020-07-18)) this is the final update for codename Stretch.[249]
Stretch becomes oldoldstable, Bullseye is the current stable release (14August 2021(2021-08-14))
Stretch long term support reached end-of-life (30June 2022(2022-06-30))[250]
Stretch extended long term support reaches end-of-life (30June 2027(2027-06-30))[217]
Debian 10 (Buster)
Debian 10 (Buster) with GNOME
Debian 10 (Buster) was released on 6July 2019(2019-07-06). It was two years and a month after Debian 9 (Stretch).[47] Debian 10 contains 57,703 packages, supports UEFI Secure Boot,[251] has AppArmor enabled by default, uses LUKS2 as the default LUKS format, and uses Wayland for GNOME by default.
Debian 10 ships with Linux kernel version 4.19.[252] Available desktops include Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, Xfce 4.12. Key application software includes LibreOffice 6.1 for office productivity, VLC 3.0 for media viewing, and Firefox ESR for web browsing.[253]
10.13 (10September 2022(2022-09-10)) this is the final update for codename Buster[267]
Buster becomes oldoldstable, Bookworm is the current stable release (10June 2023(2023-06-10))
Buster long term support reached end-of-life (30June 2024(2024-06-30))[268]
Buster extended long term support reaches end-of-life (30June 2029(2029-06-30))[269]
Debian 11 (Bullseye)
Debian 11 (Bullseye) with GNOME
Debian 11 (Bullseye) was released on 14 August 2021.[56] It is based on the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel and will be supported for five years.[270]
On 12 November 2020, it was announced that "Homeworld", by Juliette Taka, will be the default theme for Debian 11, after winning a public poll held with eighteen choices.[271]
Bullseye dropped the remaining Qt4/KDE 4 libraries and Python 2,[272][273]
and shipped with Qt 5.15 KDE Plasma 5.20.[274] Available desktops include Gnome 3.38, KDE Plasma 5.20, LXDE 11, LXQt 0.16, MATE 1.24, and Xfce 4.16.[275][276][277]
Bullseye does not support the older big-endian 32-bit MIPS architectures.[278]
The first of the code freezes, readying Debian 11 for release, began on 12 January 2021.[279]
11.11 (31August 2024(2024-08-31)); this is the final point release for Bullseye[292]
Debian 12 (Bookworm)
Debian 12 (Bookworm) with GNOME
Debian 12 (Bookworm) was released on 10 June 2023.[68] It is based on Linux kernel v6.1 LTS, and uses GNOME 43 as its default desktop environment, but as usual many other desktops are available, such as KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, and Xfce 4.18.[293]
Bookworm raised the compatibility level of its 32 bit x86 PC port from i586 to i686 compatibility.[294][295]
Debian 12 (Bookworm) is the last version of Debian with KDE Plasma 5.
Starting with Debian 12, non-free firmware packages from the "non-free-firmware" section of the Debian archive was enabled by default in the official installer and live images if and when the system determines that these packages are required, such as with modern Wi-Fi cards and modern graphics cards.[296] A change was also made to the Debian Social Contract to allow for this change to be made.[297]
On 13 October 2022, the Release Team announced the freeze development milestone timeline for this release:[93][298]
Debian 13 drops support for the mipsel (MIPS 32-bit little-endian mode) architecture[324][325] after it was dropped from the unstable branch back in 2023.[326] It also drops the installers for the i386 (all 32-bit x86 CPUs) and armel architectures.[327]
Debian directs users to keep i386 systems on Debian 12 or retiring the system in question, as the remaining packages are intended for running 32-bit x86 software on 64-bit systems and require the SSE2 CPU instruction set that most 32-bit x86 CPUs don't support.[328]
Following the release of Debian 13 (Trixie) on 9 August 2025, testing is known by the codename Forky which is anticipated to be released as Debian 14 in 2027.[342]
↑Bruce Perens (12 December 1996). "Debian 1.2 Released". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 7 November 2016. Retrieved 4 July 2017.
↑Bruce Perens (5 June 1997). "Debian 1.3 Released". Software in the Public Interest. Archived from the original on 17 November 2010. Retrieved 14 August 2021.
↑Nils Lohner (23 July 1998). "Debian 2.0 Released". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 6 January 2009. Retrieved 14 August 2021.
↑"LTS - Debian Wiki". Wiki.debian.org. Archived from the original on 7 May 2020. Retrieved 25 October 2017. Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. [..] Thus the Debian LTS team takes over security maintenance of the various releases once the Debian Security team stops its work.
↑"LTS FAQ". Wiki.debian.org. Archived from the original on 30 June 2020. Retrieved 4 May 2020.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 1.1 Buzz (June 17th, 1996): This was the first Debian release with a code name. It was taken, like all others so far, from a character in one of the Toy Story movies... in this case, Buzz Lightyear. By this time, Bruce Perens had taken over leadership of the Project from Ian Murdock, and Bruce was working at Pixar, the company that produced the movies. This release was fully ELF, used Linux kernel 2.0, and contained 474 packages.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Rex is the code name for a former Stable Debian distribution.It was released on December 12th, 1996 as Debian GNU/Linux 1.2: Named for the plastic dinosaur in the Toy Story movies. This release consisted of 848 packages maintained by 120 developers. It was superseded by DebianBo on June 5th, 1997.Rex is now obsolete and security updates are no longer provided.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 1.3 Bo (June 5th, 1997): Named for Bo Peep, the shepherdess. This release consisted of 974 packages maintained by 200 developers.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 2.0 Hamm (July 24th, 1998): Named for the piggy-bank in the Toy Story movies. This was the first multi-architecture release of Debian, adding support for the Motorola 68000 series architectures. With Ian Jackson as Project Leader, this release made the transition to libc6, and consisted of over 1500 packages maintained by over 400 developers.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 2.1 Slink (March 9th, 1999): Named for the slinky-dog in the movie. Two more architectures were added, Alpha and SPARC. With Wichert Akkerman as Project Leader, this release consisted of about 2250 packages and required 2 CDs in the official set. The key technical innovation was the introduction of apt, a new package management interface. Widely emulated, apt addressed issues resulting from Debian's continuing growth, and established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation on Open Source operating systems.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 2.2 Potato (15 August 2000): Named for "Mr Potato Head" in the Toy Story movies. This release added support for the PowerPC and ARM architectures. With Wichert still serving as Project Leader, this release consisted of more than 3900 binary packages derived from over 2600 source packages maintained by more than 450 Debian developers.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 3.0 Woody (19 July 2002): Named for the main character the Toy Story movies: "Woody" the cowboy. Even more architectures were added in this release: IA-64, HP PA-RISC, MIPS (big endian), MIPS (little endian) and S/390. This is also the first release to include cryptographic software due to the restrictions for exportation being lightened in the US, and also the first one to include KDE, now that the license issues with QT were resolved. With Bdale Garbee recently appointed Project Leader, and more than 900 Debian developers, this release contained around 8,500 binary packages and 7 binary CDs in the official set.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 3.1 Sarge (6 June 2005): named for the sergeant of the Green Plastic Army Men. No new architectures were added to the release, although an unofficial AMD64 port was published at the same time and distributed through the new Alioth project hosting site. This release features a new installer: debian-installer, a modular piece of software that feature automatic hardware detection, unattended installation features and was released fully translated to over thirty languages. It was also the first release to include a full office suite: OpenOffice.org. Branden Robinson had just been appointed as Project Leader. This release was made by more than nine hundred Debian developers, and contained around 15,400 binary packages and 14 binary CDs in the official set.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 4.0 Etch (8 April 2007): named for the sketch toy in the movie. One architecture was added in this release: AMD64, and official support for m68k was dropped. This release continued using the debian-installer, but featuring in this release a graphical installer, cryptographic verification of downloaded packages, more flexible partitioning (with support for encrypted partitions), simplified mail configuration, a more flexible desktop selection, simplified but improved localization and new modes, including a rescue mode. New installations would not need to reboot through the installation process as the previous two phases of installation were now integrated. This new installer provided support for scripts using composed characters and complex languages in its graphical version, increasing the number of available translations to over fifty. Sam Hocevar was appointed Project Leader the very same day, and the project included more than one thousand and thirty Debian developers. The release contained around 18,000 binary packages over 20 binary CDs (3 DVDs) in the official set. There were also two binary CDs available to install the system with alternate desktop environments different from the default one.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 5.0 Lenny (February 2009): named for the wind up binoculars in the Toy Story movies. One architecture was added in this release: ARM EABI (or armel), providing support for newer ARM processors and deprecating the old ARM port (arm). The m68k port was not included in this release, although it was still provided in the unstable distribution. This release did not feature the FreeBSD port, although much work on the port had been done to make it qualify it did not meet yet the qualification requirements for this release.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 6.0 Squeeze (February 2011): named for the green three-eyed aliens. The release was frozen on 6 August 2010, with many of the Debian developers gathered at the 10th Debconf at New York City. While two architectures (alpha and hppa) were dropped, two architectures of the new FreeBSD port (kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64) were made available as technology preview, including the kernel and userland tools as well as common server software (though not advanced desktop features yet). This was the first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also allow use of a non-Linux kernel.
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 7.0 Wheezy (May 2013): named for the rubber toy penguin with a red bow tie. One architecture was included in this release (armhf) and this release introduced multi-arch support, which allowed users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. Improvements in the installation process allowed visually impaired people to install the system using software speech for the first time. This was also the first release that supported the installation and booting in devices using UEFI firmware.
↑"UEFI". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 14 November 2019. Retrieved 1 January 2020. The initial support to make UEFI amd64 systems directly installable in Debian was added in Wheezy (7.0). Support was later added for i386 and arm64 systems for Jessie (8.0), along with a number of quirks and bug workarounds. Support for armhf was added in Buster (10.0).
↑"A Brief History of Debian". The Debian Project. Archived from the original on 21 December 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015. Debian 8 Jessie (April 2015): named for the cowgirl doll who first appeared in Toy Story 2.
↑"ChangeLog". stretch. Debian. 18 July 2020. Archived from the original on 8 October 2018. Retrieved 21 July 2020.
↑"Debian i386 architecture now requires a 686-class processor". Archived from the original on 17 May 2017. Retrieved 18 June 2017. Last year it was decided to increase the minimum CPU features for the i386 architecture to 686-class in the stretch release cycle. This means dropping support for 586-class and hybrid 586/686 processors[1].(Support for 486-class processors was dropped, somewhat accidentally, in squeeze.) This was implemented in the Linux kernel packages starting with Linux 4.3, which was uploaded to unstable in December last year. In case you missed that change, gcc for i386 has recently been changed to target 686-class processors and is generating code that will crash on other processors. Any such systems still running testing or unstable will need to be switched to run stable (jessie). The older processors will continue to be supported in jessie until at least 2018, and until 2020 if i386 is included in jessie LTS. The following processors, supported in jessie, are now unspported: * AMD K5, K6, K6-2, (aka K6 3D), K6-3 * DM&P/SiS Vortex86, Vortex86SX * Cyrix III, MediaGX, MediaGXm * IDT Winchip C6, Winchip 2 * Intel Pentium, Pentium with MMX * Rise mP6 * VIA C3 'Samuel 2', C3 'Ezra'
↑"Release architectures for Debian 9 'Stretch'". Archived from the original on 6 November 2016. Retrieved 28 May 2017. The only change from Jessie is the removal of powerpc as a release architecture. We discussed this at length, and eventually took the view that the least disservice to users of that port is to provide reasonable notice of its discontinuation. We recognise and acknowledge that discontinuing any port is unavoidably disruptive. The question of whether powerpc remains an architecture in the main archive or moves to ports is one for FTP masters, not the release team.
↑"Debian Is Dropping Support for Older 32-bit Hardware Architectures in Debian 9". 9 May 2016. Archived from the original on 31 October 2019. Retrieved 9 February 2020. The change has already been implemented to the Linux kernel 4.3 packages, which have been uploaded to the Debian Unstable repositories last year. And today users are being informed to move to Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" if they're still using Debian on older computers powered by i586 or i486 processors. If i386 support is to be included in the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" release, which should enter LTS (Long Term Support) stage from May 2018, the operating system will then support older 32-bit processors until the year 2020.
↑"DistroWatch.com: Debian". DistroWatch.com. Unsigned Integer Limited. 23 May 2018. Archived from the original on 27 January 2020. Retrieved 9 February 2020.
↑"Debian 12 "bookworm" released". 10 June 2023. Retrieved 21 December 2024. 32-bit PC (i386) no longer covers any i586 processor; the new minimum processor requirement is i686. If your machine is not compatible with this requirement, it is recommended that you stay with bullseye for the remainder of its support cycle.
↑"2.1. Supported Hardware". 8 May 2023. Retrieved 21 December 2024. However, Debian GNU/Linux bookworm will not run on 586 (Pentium) or earlier processors.
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