This is a quick post with some notes from my upgrade. I’ve been impressed with home smooth Debian upgrades usually go so figured it would take a hour or two to upgrade my core home lab servers.

Upgrade Steps

This is mostly a TLDR; checklist as there are plenty of good in-depth guides available online (see below).

  • confirm backups have been working
  • ensure everything has been updated to latest
    sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade && sudo apt -y full-upgrade && sudo apt -y --purge autoremove && sudo reboot
  • check /etc/debian_version to confirm running latest Debian 12 - should be something like 12.11
  • confirm only stock packages installed - remove anything of question
    sudo apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'
  • upgrade apt sources from 12 -> 13
    sudo sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
# Do the same for any other files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* (my servers didn't have any)
  • perform upgrade and reboot
    sudo apt update && sudo apt -y upgrade --without-new-pkgs && sudo apt -y full-upgrade && sudo reboot
  • clean up old packages
    sudo apt -y --purge autoremove && sudo apt -y autoclean && sudo apt -y update && sudo apt -y upgrade && sudo apt -y full-upgrade

Why Upgrade?

Debian always seems to strike a good balance of stability and recency. Many people even suggest running the test channel in production works well for them. There are some good release notes with a full list of changes, but I’m mostly looking forward to removing my use of podman-compose and replacing it with Quadlet.

  • a good overview of the process with more background can be found here