Dylan Aïssi
September 09, 2025
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After two years of maturation, Debian 13 was released on August 9th, 2025. This is the result of the hard work of hundreds of people around the world. In this blog post we will outline our main contributions during this release cycle.
As for previous Debian releases, Simon McVittie worked a lot on upgrading components of the Desktop Environment GNOME. This allowed Trixie to be released with the latest version, GNOME 48.
The default sound server since Bookworm, PipeWire, and its session manager WirePlumber have been updated to versions 1.4.2 and 0.5.8 by me (Dylan Aïssi). As usual, newer versions are also available in the backports repositories, this will continue with trixie-backports.
As part of the PipeWire maintenance, I have also prepared a package for roc-toolkit allowing me to enable the PipeWire's ROC modules ROC sink and ROC source. ROC Toolkit describes itself as a Swiss Army knife for real-time audio streaming over the network.
On the camera side, libcamera (“the MESA of the camera stack”) continues to support more and more cameras and is available at version 0.4.0. In addition to this, I have packaged libpsip), paving the way to support for the Raspberry Pi 5 camera through libcamera. This support still requires a newer version (>= 0.5) of libcamera, which is to be provided as a backport to Trixie.
In the Wayland world, I have updated Wayland and Wayland-Protocols to 1.23.1 and 1.44 respectively. I also maintain Weston (the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor) which is provided at version 14.0.2. This new Weston was also backported to Bookworm.
vkmark, a Vulkan benchmarking tool was packaged by Arnaud Ferraris.
In order to support more embedded devices, I have backported newer versions of Mesa to Bookworm. For instance, Mesa 25 is now available in the Bookworm-backports repositories. This work was part of adding support of Panthor (DRM driver for recent Arm Mali GPUs) to Debian (then backported to Bookworm). In the same way, I will continue as much as possible to provide newer Mesa through Trixie backports repositories.
From the embedded perspective, the support of OP-TEE (the Trusted Execution Environment using the Arm TrustZone technology, also compatible with RISC-V) has been improved in Debian through the packaging of optee-os and optee-test. For now, the firmware is only built for two platforms: K3-AM62x and QEMU Arm64 v8a, but others may be added depending on demand.
As part of the Mobian project (a Debian derivative for mobile devices that aims to become a Debian Blend), Arnaud Ferraris worked on packaging even more mobile-friendly user-facing applications.
Our Debian OS image builder debos was only available for the amd64 architecture in previous releases, but starting with Trixie debos is also compatible with arm64 hosts. As Arm64 machines are becoming more powerful, this allows images to be built directly for Arm64 systems. This was a team effort, thanks to Arnaud Ferraris, Christopher Obbard, Ryan Gonzalez, and Sjoerd Simons.
Following the work we do to support Rockchip devices, we have packaged the rockusb tool. This makes it easier to flash Rockchip devices from Trixie. Thanks to Arnaud Ferraris and Sjoerd Simons for this work.
Based on the work we did for Apertis, we improved the packaging of Rust alternatives for coreutils and findutils in Debian (i.e. rust-coreutils and rust-findutils). This includes reducing the storage footprint of rust-coreutils, which was a concern in embedded use-cases compared to the GNU variant. This has helped the ongoing work in Debian and Ubuntu to facilitate switching coreutils providers.
Based on Collabora's expertise in Machine Learning, I prepared a package for ONNX Runtime. Following this work, the ONNX inference plugin for GStreamer streams was enabled and is now available in the package gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad.
In the XR (virtual, augmented, and other realities) domain, Trixie comes with Monado 25.0.0 (the cross-platform open source XR runtime, see our previous blog post about Monado 25) and OpenXR SDK 1.1.47. These packages have been carefully prepared by Rylie Pavlik, who is also the upstream maintainer.
Andrej Shadura worked on updating the bmap-tools, imx-code-signing-tool, and ostree-push packages. He also created a package for libtypec.
Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana worked on updating pglistener, a tool used by sysadmins, to facilitate Postgres database monitoring.
Due to a licensing issue of a dependency not being compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, TensorFlow Lite (also known as tflite or more recently LiteRT) was accepted in the Debian archive shortly after the release of Trixie. However, I will try to get it accepted into the Trixie backports repositories.
As highlighted by talks at DebConfs, over the last few years there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the lack of tools available in the community to generate SBOMs from Debian packages and images. This wish is also due to a new European policy, the Cyber Resilience Act, which has resulted in commercial users looking for ways to be compliant with it. Since we do a lot of work in this area for Apertis (our Debian derivative), we will upstream our tooling to Debian. In the end, this will benefit Debian by improving the overall quality of its copyright information.
Feel free to contact us or any of our Debian contributors if you need advice or consulting services.
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