Debian 13 arrives with major updates for Linux users – what's new in 'Trixie'
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Debian 13 “Trixie”, 412 comments:
I rebooted after upgrade and found myself dropped in a console-only environment. Turns out the (proprietary) drivers for my video card are not supported anymore. Now I'm on nouveau and it sucks.
My fault for having an Nvidia card, I guess, but an AMD equivalent is on its way.
If you're not on btrfs, I'm sure there are similar tools for your favorite file system. For me, it's been a life saver.
Also Collabora had a nice update on tuning work they did. https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/stea...
I'm a little surprised they use casync and multiple partitions, given that root is on btrfs. As they have it is more reliable if anything does go bad, so makes sense, but: given that steam decks are on a given snapshot of the btrfs system, it seems like they could just send an incremental update to the next release and try to boot that. Oh ah, that breaks down if, like me, you disable the readonly root.
It's also almost instantaneous.
You can think about it like this: the snapshot creates a bunch of hard links to the existing files. So every file basically has 2 pointers to it.
The upgrade now updates the files in the non- snapshot paths, creating new files/keeping the snapshots on the original file. (That's afaik why it's called a CoW filesystem - copy on write)
Now, every changed file will be stored "twice", but all unchanged files are still only on the disk once.
As most upgrades still keep the majority of all files unchanged, there is effectively little space used for the snapshot
To the point where I would not upgrade my system for months at a time, when I was in the midst of important work, because I didn't want to spend a day on tty trying to make the DE work again.
In the words of Linus: FUCK NVIDIA
Normally they would probably be, but it looks like my ultra-wide screen is too much to handle for those drivers.
> you may also want to run a Bookworm kernel with a full Trixie userspace.
Good idea indeed. But at this point I'm afraid of borking everything again. I'll just wait for the replacement card I ordered and hope it doesn't make things worse.
Unfortunately, nouveau is very limited and barely works (when it works).
Eh, I'd still buy AMD if possible.
Ublue family of atomic os, provides snapshot restore which helps exactly in these scenarios.
Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support? Do I have to switch to NetBSD?
On the power usage alone surely an upgrade to a still extremely old 64bit machine would be a significant upgrade. For a server that you run continuously a 20+ year old machine will consume quite a bit.
Whether that motivates debian support is another question.
However, those computers are not so old as to have 32-bit CPUs, they are only about 10 years old, but that was because I was careful at that time to select MBs that still had PCI slots, in order to be able to retire all older computers.
I would rather be surprised if there isn't. I think antiX is one option,[1] PuppyLinux and probably Alpine Linux.
[1]: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/will-antix-24-suppor...
The problem is that someone needs to work to support different hardware architectures. More exotic hardware, more complicated and expensive the work becomes.
People who run these 32-bit machines are unlikely to vouch in terms of work contributed or money contributed to get the people paid for this work, so it is better to drop the support and focus the same developer resources on areas which benefits larger user base.
It is an overall design issue. Linux has a huge maintenance burden.
The rest is user space code. Usually in C. Which has plentiful facilities for managing this. We've been doing it for decades. How is it a sudden burden to continue?
Where are the examples of distributions failing because of this "issue?"
If you maintain an out-of-tree driver, it is extremely likely that it will fail to compile at every new kernel release.
The most common reasons are that some definitions have been moved from one kernel header to another or some members have been added to a structure or deleted from it, or some arguments have been added to a function invocation or deleted from it.
While the changes required to fix a broken device driver are typically small, finding which they are can require wasting a lot of time. The reason is that I have never seen any of the kernel developers who make these changes that break unrelated device drivers writing any migration document that instructs the device maintainers how to change the old source code to be compatible with the new interfaces.
Normally there is absolutely no explanation about the purpose of the changes and about what the users of the old API should do. Only in rare cases scanning the kernel mail messages may find some useful information. In other cases you just have to read the kernel source, to discover the intentions of whoever has changed the API.
That does the job eventually, but it consumes far more time than it should.
Even in-tree drivers for old devices, which may no longer have a current maintainer, will become broken eventually.
Unlikely? Did anyone bother to ask?
When your kernel stopped support over a decade ago (iirc) it does seem inevitable that distros will slowly evaporate.
You might be thinking of i386 or something.
They're no longer providing 32-bit images. However if you have a 64-bit processor, and a 64-bit image, you can still run 32-bit binaries.
If 32-bit support gets dropped altogether (which might happen for 'forky' or 'duke') it can probably move to the unofficial Debian Ports infrastructure, provided that people are willing to keep it up-to-date.
If it means that no 32-bit apps are supported, how does Steam handle this? Does it run 32-bit games in a VM? Is the Steam client itself a 64-bit application these days or still stuck on 32-bits?
What's your use case for 32-bit x86 where you are still keeping Debian at its latest version? Alone for the power consumption you might be better off by switching to a newer low-spec machine.
How many 32 bit PCs are still actively in used at scale to make that argument? Linux devs are now missing kernel regression bugs on 64bit Core 2 Duo hardware because not enough people are using them anymore to catch and report these bugs, and those systems are newer and way more capable for daily driving than 32 bit ones. So then if nobody uses Core 2 Duo machines anymore, how many people do you think are using 32bit Pentium 4/Athlon XP era machines to make that argument?
But let's pretend you're right, and assume there's hoards of Pentium 4 users out there refusing to upgrade for some bizarre reason, and are unhappy they can't run the latest Linux, then using a Pentium 4 with its 80W TDP as a terminal would be an insane waste of energy when that's less capable than some no-name Android table with a 5W ARM SoC which can even play 1080p Youtube while the Pentium 4 cannot even open a modern JS webpage. Even most of the developing world now has more capable mobile devices in their pockets and don't have use for the Pentium 4 machines that have long been landfilled.
And legacy industrial systems still running Pentium 4 HW, are just happy to keep running the same Windows XP/Embedded they came from the factory since those machines are airgapped and don't need to use latest Linux kernel for their purpose.
So sorry, but based on this evidence, your argument is literally complaining for the sake of complaining about problems that nobody outside of retro computing hobbyists have who like using old HW for tinkering with new SW as a challenge. But it's not a real issue for anyone. So what I don't get is the entitled expectations that the SW industry should keep writing new SW for free to keep it working for your long outdated 25+ year old CPU just because you, for some reason, refuse to upgrade to more modern HW that can be had for free.
There are good faith arguments to be had about the state of forced obsolescence in the industry with Microsoft, Apple, etc, but this is not one of them.
>Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support? Do I have to switch to NetBSD?
Yes there are, tonnes: AntiX, Devuan, Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core Linux, etc
Insane how far hardware got: the pentium 4 engineers probably felt like the smartest people alive and now a pentium 4 looks almost as ridiculous and outdated to us as vacuum tube computers.
I ran a mailserver for thousands of people on a 486 DX 33Mhz. It had smtp, pop3 and imap. It was more than powerful enough to handle it with ease.
I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.
These days I have a a machine from 2018 or 2019, which I upgraded to 32G of RAM and I added an NVME drive in addition to the spinning rust earlier this year.. because firefox got (extremely, more than a minute to start the browser) sluggish due to an HDD instead of NVME.
Now, it's obvious that an NVME drive is superior, but it surprises me how incredibly lackadaisical we've gotten with resource usage. It surprises me how little "extra" we get, except ads that requires more and more resources. Sure, we've got higher resolution photos, higher resolution videos, and now AI will require vast resources (which of course is cool). At the same time, we don't get that much more utility out of our computers.
Only if you ignore the business economic realities of the world we live in. Unless you work at hyperscaleres of MS/google/meta where every fraction of percent optimization save millions of dollars, nobody is pays SW engineers to optimize SW for old consumer devices because it's money wasted you won't recoup so you offload it on the customer to buy better HW. Rinse and repeat.
>I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.
Why isn't it supremely capable anymore? It will still be just as capable if you run the same software from 1999 on it. Or do you expect to run 2025 SW on it?
> the pentium 4 engineers probably felt like the smartest people alive
The P4's NetBurst architecture had some very serious issues, so that might not be true. NetBurst assumed that 10GHz clock speeds would soon be a thing, and some of the engineers back then might have had enough insight to guess that this approach was based on an oversimplified view of semiconductor industry trends. The design took a lot of stupid risks, such as the ridiculously long instruction pipeline, and they were always unlikely to pay off.
You cannot run the software you want on that device, so I don't see how you can claim that.
Or if you have specific X86 terminal SW, use a PC with a 64 bit CPU if you want to run modern PC SW. They've been making them since 2003. That's 23 years of used 64bit HW on the market that you can literally get for free at this point.
Or keep using your old 32 bit system to run your old 32 bit terminal SW. Nobody's taking away your ability to run your old 32 bit version of the SW when new 64 bit SW comes out.
In my case, by using XFCE.
I guess if you like Gnome that doesn't really apply, since that isn't availible easily on Mint, but Gnome is one of the reasons I didn't want Ubuntu.
Saying that Debian is "not Ubuntu to begin with" is of course technically true, but the similarities are so large that I have a hard time seeing anyone would have much of an issue switching, Ubuntu is and always has been based on Debian.
On servers, my experience is that Ubuntu is, while not "better", far more common, simply because of the fact that they have a more clear and understandable paid support plan, which I guess makes sense. Not that most users bother to pay for it anyway, but at least it's there if you end up with an EOL system you can't decom.
Boring and rock-solid is also how I like my desktop.
In the stable distribution, packages tend to be a little dated obviously, but at least it is _stable_. And you can go with the _testing_ distribution for more up-to-date packages.
Also, as a sysadmin, I like having it on my computer to develop and test scripts without having to SSH in a dedicated environment (I still have to eventually but only for the final tests).
Not saying one is better than the other, just remarking that it's interesting to see 'getting in the way' meaning completely opposite things for different people :).
But now my schedule only lets me do an update once a month rather than daily, so it feels more likely to introduce breaking changes and I'd rather just leave her all until a specific moment when I have the time to work through it all, and the longer term support distris help with that because those big all-at-once upgrades seem to be better documented.
Different strokes and all that
Debian comes with backports repositories which allow you to cleanly install newer versions of selected packages, without affecting the rest of the system.
Not really sure I'd swap Fedora's _really good_ driver support for it, but since I'm running Silverblue and most of my "civilian" apps are flatpaks I probably wouldn't notice the difference.
The only real reason to use Debian is that you think what Debian is trying to do is a good thing. They have a very clear definition of what they consider acceptable software engineering practices, how they think things shoud work, what's acceptable from free software and they do a lot of work to ensure what they ship fit that. They value portability to an extreme, have strong opinions about how linking should be done, separations of concern and what can be considered free software. It's an extremely political distribution with a lot of patching happening to try to shoe horn things into their vision.
I personally think it's extremely misguided, breaks a lot of good sotfware, mostly unsafe, a significant drag on the people actually developping what they ship, and basically the embodyment of everything that is wrong with Linux distribution as a concept. Others will tell you they are fighting the good fight for their users freedom and the guardian of the kingdom.
How you stand on this will determine if Debian - and its derivatives which bring its flaws with the Debian inheritance - makes sense for you.
I ran away from Ubuntu to Debian and am very happy: it's still the same system, just without the things that were becoming annoying (eg snaps).
- To get more recent versions of software
I drive a car. For almost anything besides wiper water, gas and oil in terms of maintenance, I go to a mechanic. OK, yes, in theory I know how to change tires, and I even have the tools to do it myself, but I let a workshop do it for me, purely out of convenience. I couldn't care less about the guts of the car; the only thing I care about is how often it annoys me and basically requires me to bring it to a mechanic. Is the motor "not targeted at me"?
This is how most people I know see and use their computers/tablets/phones.