A Quick Look At Debian 13 "Trixie"

One of the oldest and most important Linux distributions out there of course is Debian. Debian's been with us since 1993. Debian is a mainstay both on the server and on Linux desktop and today I'm going to take a look at the recent release of Debian, Debian 13 codenamed Trixie. I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. Here in the boot menu we've got several options. We've got the advanced option if you want to go through and possibly do some advanced things like instead of doing standard Debian stable maybe you wanted to do the testing branch or the unstable branch. I've actually done videos in the past on how to use the advanced option installer in Debian but today I'm just going to run through the standard graphical install and we're just going to do mainline Debian with the GNOME desktop. And the installer pops up. It's the familiar installer here. First we choose the language for the installation. English and English are chosen here so I don't need to do anything. I just click continue. Now set your location. It has correctly chosen the United States for me so nothing for me to change here. Just click continue. Configure the keyboard. American English is my key map. Again nothing for me to do here and then detect and mount some components. Loading additional components. It's detecting some network hardware. It's doing a lot of automated configuration right. It's a pretty standard kind of installation where you don't have to do too much. For the most part you click okay a handful of times and everything is set up for you. Now it's asking me to set up a hostname here for the computer. I'm going to call this computer Debian-VM. That way if I ever have to SSH into this machine I know that the machine that I'm remoting into is my Debian virtual machine and then click continue. And then the domain name. I don't need a domain name. This is not going to be a web server so I just leave that blank and click continue. Next up is the root password. Now Debian is interesting because if you don't want to use the root user then do not enter the root password because then it will instead just use sudo which is what I want to do. So I'm going to leave all of this blank. So I'm going to click continue and then my user account. Full name for the user account. My user will be DT. His username will also be DT. And then I create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password and then click continue. And then the time zone. It has not chosen the correct time zone for me. I'm in the central time zone so that's been the only thing I've had to manually change here. Then it's configuring the clock, detecting the disk. It's starting up the partitioner. So now it's going to ask me about the partition scheme. Now I'm going to use guided so I'm going to let Debian have the entire virtual hard drive inside this virtual machine. If I needed to manually partition it myself there is a manual option but I'm going to give Debian the whole disk here. So there we go and then choose the disk. There's only one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine so that's the one that needs to be selected. And then how do I want to partition that drive? Do I want all files in one partition? That's what I'm going to do but it's got some more exotic choices like having a separate home partition which might be something you want to do if you were doing this on physical hardware. A lot of people like having their home in a separate partition from everything else but for purposes of this VM I'll do all files in one partition. And here is the partition scheme and it's very smartly done a nice job here because I've only gave this VM 20 gigs of space. So for the swap it's only going to use one gig which is fine. If it would have been like a we're going to do a six gig or eight gig swap or something crazy you know then I would go back and manually partition it because that would be too much space to give to swap in the case of this VM. But this is nicely done. I like that so I'm going to click continue and we get a review here. Is all this good? I'm going to click yes and click continue and away we go. It's going to install the base system. This might take a few minutes. I'll be back once the install has completed. That portion of the install are completed in just a couple of minutes. Next up scanning your installation media finds the label yada yada yada. Do you wish to scan for more media? No there's no more media to look for. A network mirror can you be used to supplement software? Do I want to add a network mirror? I'm going to leave the default which is no and then away it goes. I'm going to install some more software and then configuring popularity contest. So that's the Popcon program. It basically sends some telemetry back to the Debian developers about the machine. It helps them improve Debian right so it's good information to give to the developers. By default it's turned off if you want to though you can click yes. For purposes of this VM I'll leave Popcon turned off. Next up choose your desktop. GNOME is the default so that's what I'm going to go with but you've got several options including XFCE, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, LXQt and then you have a web server setup SSH server as well. For me I'm just going to go with the standard desktop with the GNOME desktop environment and it just finished installing all the desktop related software the GNOME desktop environment. It just installed the grub bootloader setting up the hardware clock and that is it installation complete. So let me go ahead and reboot the machine. So let me click continue. The machine reboots just fine. I get a grub menu and we come to the login manager. Of course this is GNOME's login manager GDM. Let me go ahead and log in and we get straight into the desktop environment. I get a little welcome application here. Let's go ahead and take the tour and let's begin. So this is just your standard little GNOME welcome application let you know a little bit about the desktop how to use it. Now for me I kind of know how to use GNOME so I'll quickly scroll through that and exit the program. The first thing I need to do since this is a VM I'm going to hit the super key and I'm going to search for the display program. So let's go into the display settings here and change the screen resolution. I need this to be 1920 by 1080. Let me click apply. Let me tell it to keep the changes and now from this point forward the virtual machine should always remember that I want to use a 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. So what is new in Debian 13? Well to answer some of those questions let me once again hit the super key. I'm going to search for settings. Let's go into the settings manager here and if I scroll all the way down let's go into system and this gives me some useful information about the system and if I go down to this here about and click on that that will let me know some information for example the system details. Click on that and now I get the GNOME version. We're on GNOME 48. We're using Wayland by the way. GNOME has been defaulting to Wayland for a while now and you can see our kernel version is 6.12.38. Some other interesting things is if I search for the terminal here and I really don't like the fact that it is using black text on a white background. Let's see if I can quickly change that. Let's go into preferences here and nothing came up when I, oh it just took a second. That was weird that the preferences took a little while. If I go into unnamed which is the profile and I go into colors let's change color scheme. Let's do GNOME dark. All right there we go and let me zoom in here so control shift plus zooms in control minus zooms out. That's standard key bindings for pretty much all terminals. If I do apt dash dash version you can see we are now on apt 3.0 for the apt version. For those of you not familiar with Debian, Debian's package manager is apt and this new version 3.0 comes with some speed and efficiency improvements. It also comes with some visual improvements, some coloring. Because this release of Debian, Debian 13 came out a week or two ago there's probably some updates I could take. So I could do a sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade. Let's go ahead and update the system. Give it my sudo password. Oh and I get an error. Let's see. So it looks like we have some kind of error in our sources. So the sources for the apt package manager. It's looking for a repository cd-rom which I guess it won't allow me to do an update from it. Well let's just remove that repository from the sources list. So on a Debian or Debian based system I believe it's etsy apt is the directory we need to go to. So let's cd into etsy apt and I believe the file. I don't know if vim is here but I need to edit this with sudo privileges sudo vim and it is sources. Is that it? Sources.list. Okay vim of course is not here. As much as I hate to use vi let's use vi then. And let me zoom way out here and you can see deb cd-rom all of this here. And I think what I'll do is I will just comment out the line. So I'll put a hashtag a hash symbol pound sign at the beginning of that line and let me write and quit out of that. I'm going to up arrow and rerun the sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade. And let's see summary not upgrading yet because it doesn't have any sources. That was the only thing in that file. I guess I need to add some sources. One thing I could do is there a gnome software center. It may make this a little easier. Let me search for software. There we go. Let me just go into the graphical software center. Up to date. Checked. Installed. I probably have to go into preferences. Let's go into preferences. Only show free software. Now this is not what I want. Where are the sources? There's got to be a way. Software repositories. There it is. There we go. And let me turn on this repository here which is your standard Debian Trixie AMD 64 DVD yada yada yada. Now that I've turned that on now I probably can update the system. I could do it through the graphical package manager probably. Let's see. Allow me to refresh. No. Let me just do it at the terminal. Once again sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. And no because all I did was turn back on the repository that it doesn't like. Now this is very very frustrating. This is strange here. Okay well we'll turn that off again. Disable. Get Linux vendor firmware setup. Okay yeah I am not sure why there are just no repositories here. Only show free software. That's not what I want. I want proprietary software if I need it. Now I have no idea what is going on with this. Obviously this is a big deal. If you can't actually install and remove software let me make sure that this is not working. Sudo apt install vim. Error. Vim has no installation candidate. All right this seems like a pretty big error that you know I'm sure there was probably something in the installer program where I needed to add sources. Something to tick on but it wasn't obvious. And if I was able to go through the installation and screw up this bad to where I don't have any sources available for the apt package manager I'm sure I'm not the only one. So I would say this is this is a pretty big bug. So let me open a web browser and I'm just going to go to the internet and find like a standard sources file and I will manually add the sources that I need to add here. Let me go ahead and move the Firefox browser over here. Move the terminal window over here. We'll split the screen in half here. I'm going to go to the Debian subreddit here. Search for sources and let's see if anybody else is having problems with missing sources. Yeah I see a few people that were having problems. Sources.list and GUI. This is from seven months ago. Let's look for something just a few days old. How about 13 days old. Yeah so this is somebody probably having the same problem as me. Here we go. Apparently they did have it in the release notes. We need to run the command sudo apt and then modernize-sources. So let me copy that and then go into the terminal. Let me do a control shift v to paste and now I'm just going to answer that yes. Respond no in the following prompt. I don't know if I was supposed to answer that yes or not but let me up arrow a few times until I get to the sudo apt update and then sudo apt upgrade and let's see if this works this time. It does not. So maybe when I do a sudo apt modern sources. All sources are modern. Let me do a sudo apt. Let's try to install vim again. Vim is not an installation candidate. What the hell is going on here? So sudo vim or vi since vim is not here. Slash etc. Yeah there's nothing in sources.list now. So let's see cd into slash etc apt and then sources.list.d. Is there anything in this directory? No there's no sources at all now. All right I found another post from somebody just a couple of hours ago having this problem. Edit etc apt sources.list.d debian.sources. So I guess do I even have that file? That is because when I did ls in slash etc slash apt slash sources.list.d and I did ls there is not a debian.sources file. Well let's create one. Sudo vi debian.sources. It's an empty document of course. I'm just going to copy what I found here. Copy that. Now for non-tech savvy people they will not have gone through any of the trouble that I've gone through trying to solve this problem here. So you know again this is this is a major issue. I'm sure that the debian guys yeah there we go and it fixed the repos. Now I can actually update the system and install and remove software. All right finally let's go ahead and update the system. It's probably going to be a big update because this was released about a couple of weeks ago. So I'll let the update happen and then I'll reboot the machine. Hopefully everything is straightened out now. Actually because the update is going to take a minute let me just go ahead and move to a different workspace and take a look at the system. I'm just going to quickly show you what is on a default installation. It looks like it's your standard gnome desktop. It's vanilla gnome 48. Your standard suite of applications as far as all the gnome programs. They did install the libreoffice suite. We have calc, draw, impress, and writer available to us. Let's see what version we're on because that is the question with a stable release like debian stable. They could be on some older versions but this is libreoffice 25.2.3.2. LibreOffice fantastic program. I use it all the time. The word processor, the presentation program are the two I use the most. Sometimes I play around with the spreadsheet program as well. One interesting thing let's actually go to the file manager. I did notice by default they're using a light theme which again that's kind of the default setting. How would I switch to a dark theme? I think I can just click dark style there. Yeah changes us to a dark gtk theme and also change the wallpaper to something appropriate for the dark theme. So I do like that that is easy. I click out of that, hit the super key again to get back into the menu system. Is there anything else? It's really not a lot of programs. It's just the one screen. We do have some sub categories here of utilities which is your standard gnome utilities like file roller which is your archiving tool. The image viewer. You have a system category for some system settings. The gnome tweaks tool is also here as well if you need to make tweaks to the system. So here's some appearance tweaks so we can change the icon and the cursor as well as well as the dark style image as well. We also have our startup application so this is your auto start programs right now. Nothing is set to auto start. Really it's just your standard vanilla gnome desktop environment. There's really not much changes as far as the desktop itself. There's not much to show here. Take a quick look at some of the default wallpapers. These are just gnome wallpapers. There's not really any Debian branded wallpapers. There's a few from years past like this one here that I'm quite fond of. The Debian logo here. Right. Really nice wallpaper. Prefer something that has a little bit more color. Maybe something like this one here. Click on that and that's not bad but with a dark theme I like a light wallpaper. So let's see if we can find something that is light. I could do something like this. It's a little too orange. How about this one here. Yeah I like that one. We'll just go back to the Debian branded wallpaper now. I believe this is what was default with the light theme but I think this works with the dark theme as well. We can also play with the accent colors. You know maybe I want to do something different. Maybe a red accent color or a green accent color. Let's go with that. Here we go. We got some accent colors here in the SysTrade menu. Yeah I'm not crazy with the green with the blue wallpaper. It's a little cheesy but you know what for purposes of this video I'll leave it alone. Obviously most of the changes under the hood are going to be the big changes would be the kernel. You get a new kernel. You get a new desktop environment. They updated many packages in the repos. They updated more than 40,000 packages that are in the Debian repos. They did make some tweaks to the installer as far as improvements and performance. They obviously made some changes to the apt package manager although it looked like it's a little buggy as far as the sources file. It does work once you get the sources file working. There's also been some added support for RISC-V architecture as well so there's a lot of big under the hood style changes to Debian but for those of you that are wondering about the desktop if you're comfortable with the standard GNOME desktop environment and you want a long-term support stable kind of distribution Debian of course. Debian's been around since the beginning of time and it's kind of the go-to distribution for millions of desktop Linux users. So that's all I'm going to do on this video. Very quick and cursory look at really just the installation process and me getting the apt package manager to work. I actually did not expect to have any major bugs like that. I'm kind of shocked. I'm glad I got it on camera because probably some of you guys are going to run into that same bug and at least you got to see how I solved the problem. Now before I go I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this Mark Methos, Arjan Paul, Peace Archimedora, Realities for Less, Red Prophet, Roland, RewardGen2 and Ubuntu and Willy. These guys they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys this quick look at Debian 13 code name Trixie it would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like Debian subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace guys.