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Debian is a free and open source, Linux-based operating system that's bee around for more than three decades. And computers have changed a lot in that time. So while Debian has a reputation for releasing updates on a slow, steady, and stable basis rather than pushing bleeding edge features, the operating system has made some major changes over the years.
This weekend the Debian team announced the release of Debian 13 "trixie," which brings a pretty big change: it's adding support for riscv64 architecture while ending support for i386 "as a regular architecture."
Debian 13 with LXQT 2.1.0 desktop environment Basically that means that it should be easier to install and run Debian on devices with RISC-V processors without any workarounds or customization required.
But there's no longer an official kernel or Debian installer for older computers with Intel i386 chips. The Debian team suggests users running Debian 12 or earlier on an i386 system not upgrade to Debian 13. You may be able to reinstall the operating system using the amd64 installer, but since Debian 12 will be officially supported through June 30, 2028, you're probably better off sticking with the older version of the operating system on older hardware.
Debian is also planning to phase out support for ARM-based processors earlier than ARMv7 and says that Debian 12 will be the last version to officially support the architecture.
Aside from changes to supported architecture, there are some other significant changes in Debian 13 "trixie." It's the first major release from the Debian team in over two years, and it brings major updates to supported desktop environments including GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXDE, LXQt, Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE.
The operating system now uses the Linux Kernel 6.12 LTS, features updates to more than half of available packages, including applications like Apache, Bash, GIMP, LibreOffice, and Python, and over 14,000 new packages (while nearly 9,000 older packages have been removed from the repository because they're considered obsolete).
While Debian isn't updated as frequently as some other operating systems (Ubuntu gets two major updates each year, for example), many other popular GNU/Linux distributions are based on Debian (including Ubuntu, Devuan, Armbian, and Raspberry Pi OS, just to name a few).
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