just noticed apt reported the repos changed their 'Suite' value from 'stable' to 'oldstable'. that can only mean a new debian got released.

historically i have read that raspberry team don't support or recommend upgrading and would rather have you start from scratch again. would this still be the case, or do we think debian on arm64 has stabilized enough to consider upgrading?

i know some people have decided to ignore previous advise and have been able to upgrade without issues. it really depends on anyone's setup.

personally I have plenty of docker containers running including pihole and home assistant, so whatever method (stock install, upgrade) will experience downtime. ideally i think an upgrade is going to be less painful than starting over, even if something breaks during the upgrade.

what is everyone's opinion on this?

I'm waiting for when its officially released

Raspberry pi 5 user (debian Trixie)
Pico 2W

Some people have had success in upgrading releases in the past, but nobody knows much about upgrades to Trixie at the current time. Trixie doesn't seem to have the type of cataclysmic changes that Bookworm did (replace dhcpcd with NetworkManager, Wayland, etc etc), but we still don't have eyes on the RasPiOS team's changes much yet.

Personally I've never been much of an upgrader. In the good old OS days (Windows, older LInux) it was not possible or the upgrades sometimes didn't work. or left a lot of cruft laying around (it would work, but WTF is this file doing here from 2 versions ago?)

For the Pi I'm a big fan of rebuilding, and I structured my build tool and backups to facilitate that. I can rebuild any of my Pis from a common customized IMG with per-server configurations (services, network, storage, etc) quickly and easily.

When the next RasPiOS comes out I fix things once in my tool, and blast new disks.

Pi tools:
Quickly and easily build customized exactly as-you-want SSDs/SD Cards: https://github.com/gitbls/sdm
Easily run and manage your network's DHCP/DNS servers on a Pi: https://github.com/gitbls/ndm
Easy and secure IPSEC/IKEV2 VPN installer/manager: https://github.com/gitbls/pistrong
Lightweight Virtual VNC Config: https://github.com/gitbls/RPiVNCHowTo

Have a read through viewtopic.php?t=389477

Been waiting for this one, I skipped bookworm on a number of Pi's, hopefully trixie to forky will definitely be an in-place upgrade by the time that comes around.

bls wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 09, 2025 10:58 pm

Trixie doesn't seem to have the type of cataclysmic changes that Bookworm did (replace dhcpcd with NetworkManager, Wayland, etc etc), but we still don't have eyes on the RasPiOS team's changes much yet.

After previous "breaking stuff" changes when going from Jessie upwards, it would be very useful if major changes could be documented in a simple way in one place (a sticky) so people don't keep posting with things like "why doesn't my python stuff work anymore (venv)"...
However, I too won't be rushing to upgrade until the dust has well and truly settled.

fjleon wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 09, 2025 9:44 pm

what is everyone's opinion on this?

As already suggested, my opinion is that you should read the 6-week-old thread started by Raspberry Pi themselves on just this topic, and already containing 200+ contributions.

viewtopic.php?t=389477

Beware of the Leopard

MarkDH102 wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 10, 2025 5:53 am

bls wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 09, 2025 10:58 pm

Trixie doesn't seem to have the type of cataclysmic changes that Bookworm did (replace dhcpcd with NetworkManager, Wayland, etc etc), but we still don't have eyes on the RasPiOS team's changes much yet.

After previous "breaking stuff" changes when going from Jessie upwards, it would be very useful if major changes could be documented in a simple way in one place (a sticky) so people don't keep posting with things like "why doesn't my python stuff work anymore (venv)"...
However, I too won't be rushing to upgrade until the dust has well and truly settled.

You know documenting costs time and the advantage for a company to not support in-place upgrading is also that they can easily get you use things you haven't asked for and maybe you didn't not even want if you had been kindly asked for. This also includes better or enhanced standard packages so strange custom HW chips or architecture will work with Linux. So you won't buy other brand computer that maybe work out of the box with Linux.

But for generic distros packages changes are needed as otherwise the base which is Debian (non-profit), gets unmanageable and a mess so no-one wants to spent their time on it anymore (go to Windows then). Computers, same as living creatures, need to adapt continuously as otherwise they get vulnerable or killed. And there is Moore's law, so people generally want more, better, new.

The topic title is Debian 13 Trixie released, that is simply the case I can confirm. But the RPL patches and changes have not been released. So now it depends on how much you involved yourself with special RPL additions. As you might know, Debian can run and is supported on RPi2 and RPi3/4 (ARMv7 and ARMv8), but not anymore on ARMv6 but still special armel for RPi0/1. There is no support for RPi5 (or at least not the same level as RPi3/4). So if you use vanilla Debian on RPi3/4, it simply is https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/ ... es.en.html

In general, the bigger the gaps between updating/upgrading, the bigger the risk something will break. You can spread the risk by using a rolling release. You get small changes at a steady rate that are easier to handle and you also will see what makes sense to prepare already for future changes as every package has changes list, so things like 'this will change or this will get obsolete next release' are clearly there (4 years timeframe).
The problem with 'wipe and start from scratch' is that companies might have documented changes, but the user quite often does not have a good list of notes what has been done to the base installation. It is not only required things, but also things like your background picture, colors, taste in general. All gets wiped because company or a script provider does not and cannot know all that. And for a company it cost money and as indicated, they loose the option to enable ('soft')vendor lock-in.

Last edited by redvli on Sun Aug 10, 2025 6:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

It is not recommended and still will not be, that's already been posted (see provided links)

Yep, we've been testing it out.
Some with different than the standard PiOS setups.and found what has caused them problems

I would suggest, back it up, then give it a test. You can contribute to the feedback.

B.Goode wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 10, 2025 6:08 am

fjleon wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 09, 2025 9:44 pm

what is everyone's opinion on this?

As already suggested, my opinion is that you should read the 6-week-old thread started by Raspberry Pi themselves on just this topic, and already containing 200+ contributions.

viewtopic.php?t=389477

That topic is indeed the one to scan, although already the opening post is already tricky. Besides the rather basic and simple Debian dist-upgrade method (change .list file and apt update && apt full-upgrade) it also comes with special setting for dpkg. I am not an expert on dpkg, I know a few options, but it seems to me that the intention is to replace old configs with new config. The last thing you should do is that, assuming you have made various changes to default that, if they aren't kept, will make things fail. 'fail' can mean unbootable remote RPi, that will then take a day and maybe travel to get it fixed.
The reason for this dpkg options seems to me that it allows newer versions to not deal with potentially old config options. New labwc or so might otherwise simply fail to start or crash. The topic title is 'Updating to trixie' which most will maybe interpret as a way to get trixie running. Better would be 'Updating to RPiOS Trixie'. So it is about how well RPL patches work with Debian Testing (Trixie since a few hours).

fjleon wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 09, 2025 9:44 pm

just noticed apt reported the repos changed their 'Suite' value from 'stable' to 'oldstable'. that can only mean a new debian got released.

historically i have read that raspberry team don't support or recommend upgrading and would rather have you start from scratch again. would this still be the case, or do we think debian on arm64 has stabilized enough to consider upgrading?

i know some people have decided to ignore previous advise and have been able to upgrade without issues. it really depends on anyone's setup.

personally I have plenty of docker containers running including pihole and home assistant, so whatever method (stock install, upgrade) will experience downtime. ideally i think an upgrade is going to be less painful than starting over, even if something breaks during the upgrade.

what is everyone's opinion on this?

For your containers, think for yourself how well you know how to fix every potential issue. There are always limits, so at least you should know how to restore from backups. That is basically what I learned myself the past decades. I was once Software Design Engineer (deeply embedded, assembly and C-code) but learned myself bash scripting (not perfect at all), so I now have basically unattended restore of virtual machines and also a complete NAS box. Still HW and/or SW can fail, see:
viewtopic.php?t=389477&start=175#p2330965
If there wouldn't have been the failure in LVM Thin Pool for my RPi4 setup, it would be only 5 minutes max downtime, that is what a whole setup reboot takes, faster actually, but granularity for things like temperature measurement is 5 minutes. My energy meter is every 10 seconds so I loose anyhow some data in the database, but that is no big deal, cost calculation is on hourly basis (for myself, yearly basis for energy company).

Although I do not use it, methods are there to prevent long downtime: https://kubic.opensuse.org/documentatio ... ate.8.html
Not sure if this is in Debian, but you can use Btrfs, that is 1 part of the method (required actually). I use snapper to make snapshots, so in case of software failure I can rollback very easily. I do that by manually changing the default subvolume. This is also automated in GRUB2 (originally SuSE patches, not sure if it is upstream in Linux or Debian). It is called 'boot from previous snaphot' or so. Does not work in default RPi setups, GRUB cannot work with proprietary boot loaders, so for RPi3/4 you can use EFI stub and/or U-Boot stub.

kip_the_elder wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 10, 2025 12:37 pm

Given how easy and fast it is to start from scratch with a new OS and given the unknown unknowns, I generally prefer to start from scratch on a PI on a new SD card....Retaining the old SD card; just in case I need to go back.

^ This is the way. I'm always amazed when someone posts how they've backed themselves into a corner with no way to get back.

Pi tools:
Quickly and easily build customized exactly as-you-want SSDs/SD Cards: https://github.com/gitbls/sdm
Easily run and manage your network's DHCP/DNS servers on a Pi: https://github.com/gitbls/ndm
Easy and secure IPSEC/IKEV2 VPN installer/manager: https://github.com/gitbls/pistrong
Lightweight Virtual VNC Config: https://github.com/gitbls/RPiVNCHowTo

bensimmo wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 10, 2025 6:56 am

It is not recommended and still will not be, that's already been posted (see provided links)

Yep, we've been testing it out.
Some with different than the standard PiOS setups.and found what has caused them problems

I would suggest, back it up, then give it a test. You can contribute to the feedback.

I can understand that PiOS can only test clean images but I see no reason why anyone with at least an intermediate knowledge of Linux systems would ever have much trouble upgrading. An even if it goes wrong somehow you can always try a clean image so I myself would never even think about starting with a new image. But I get that someone who needs to ask whether to do it and is unsure about it probably shouldn't.

I used the thread to do an upgrade linked to earlier but noticed this.....

I don't know if it will work with RaspiOS version...

How to Upgrade to Debian 13 (Trixie) from 12 (Bookworm) https://share.google/169eRttSf8xW93Rqy

No issues with the upgrade here, I am however using x11/xorg and not wayland on XFCE.
Even doing apt modernize-sources worked with no issues.
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.sources
Origin: Raspberry Pi Foundation
Types: deb
URIs: http://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian/
Suites: trixie
Architectures: arm64 armhf
Components: main beta untested
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/raspberrypi-archive-keyring.gpg

Types: deb
URIs: http://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian/
Suites: bookworm
Architectures: arm64 armhf
Components: main beta untested
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/raspberrypi-archive-keyring.gpg
Enabled: yes

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources
# Debian 13 Trixie
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: https://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: trixie trixie-updates trixie-proposed-updates
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

# Security Updates
Types: deb
URIs: https://deb.debian.org/debian-security/
Suites: trixie-security
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-backports.sources
Origin: Debian Trixie Backports
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: https://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: trixie-backports
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg
Enabled: yes

Raspberry PI 500 Pi OS Trixie Kernel: 6.12.58-v8 Ram: 8GB DE: XFCE
Debian - "The Universal OS - One OS to Rule Them ALL"

Upgrading to Trixie - your options:

1. Wait for Raspberry Pi to release their Trixie-based distro. When they do, start afresh with a new SD card (or other media). This is the recommended option for most people.

That said, the beta forum offers guidance to those who are technically proficient and comfortable with potentially losing data, time and patience on such a move. There is a big fat warning at the top:

spl23 wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 01, 2025 7:03 am

Beforehand, I need to stress a few things. First, we will never officially recommend or support doing this - our recommended approach will always be to start with a clean trixie image and to install whatever programs and data you need [that you were using with] the previous bookworm image. While we do what we can to make sure that it is possible to upgrade a bookworm image, we can only test clean images; we cannot test every combination of software and configuration that a user might have applied, and any such changes can cause the update to fail in a fashion we could not predict which may leave you with a broken and unrecoverable system. You should not attempt to upgrade any system on which you are relying, and you should not attempt to upgrade any system without taking a full backup first. We are not responsible if this process does result in a broken image - all we can say is that the upgrade process described here has been repeatedly tested and found to work on the most recent clean bookworm image.

(Minor tweak [in brackets] by me, and emphasis also mine).

If you do go down the in-place upgrade route, you would be well advised to follow the thread in the beta forum, and post any issues there, rather than following any other procedure that is not specific to Raspberry Pi OS. Or just use option 1 above.

Last edited by andrum99 on Sat Aug 16, 2025 11:23 am, edited 2 times in total.

andrum99 wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 10, 2025 8:39 pm

Upgrading to Trixie - your options:

1. Wait for Raspberry Pi to release their Trixie-based distro. When they do, start afresh with a new SD card (or other media). This is the recommended option for most people.

I had a spare Ubuntu 12 Usb and tried updating that on my Pi5 4gb.
Ubuntu was working... I still hadn't figured put how to add dtparam=waveshare monitor, so I had to use hdmi out...
It was a fresh install just to try it out. I pulled the repo search for trixie and pulled the latest upgrade--
It didn't boot back up.
Maybe was better to try with Debian, but I would rather do a fresh install at this point.
Test Usb is still test Usb afterall--

Looking forward for an official release even if I still have to learn my ways through to make raspi-config functional
in any rpi Linux distro, get GPIOs nvme to work... audio hat... I want to try it for to install VCV rack, it's
a musical Eurorack software simulator with audio and midi in and out, that unfortunately cannot be installed
on standard raspios.. or so I guess... maybe there is a way to do it... virtual venv, idk...

"You can understand perfectly, if you give your mind to it" - Kernel Panic!! Attempt to kill!!! -

RaspyHat wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 09, 2025 10:36 pm

I'm waiting for when its officially released

Same, wonder what the timeline might be?

_________________________________________________________________________________
Pi model B / Pi 2 / Pi 3 / Pi 4 / Pi 5 / Pi 400 / Pi 500 / Pi Zero W / Pi Zero 2 W / Pico

SD, SSDs wear out and fill up with fluff, stuff I installed for testing or curiosity.
New OS, new SD/SSD.

I now have a case that can handle 2 x NVMEs, so the old files I still need will get copied to the new OS SSD.
Waiting for the release of the Pironman 5 NAS so I can also backup to rotating rust.
Trixie means new cases, new SSD, both should last until Pi6/Debian14.

I'm dancing on Rainbows.
Raspberries are not Apples or Oranges

1) Follow the release notes for Debian
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/ ... ex.en.html
I would also suggest modernizing sources.
2) Backup configs/settings

Settings and Personal Data

Before you install, you should probably back up the settings from your programs, this can easily be done by grabbing folders from /etc and all the content from your user directory :

rsync --progress /home/`whoami` /path/to/user/profile/backup/here

After you install, you can restore it with:

rsync --progress /path/to/user/profile/backup/here /home/`whoami`

Backup System configs
sudo tar -czf etc-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /etc

Backup Installed Packages
dpkg --get-selections > package-selections-$(date +%Y%m%d).txt

Backup keyrings
sudo tar -czf keyrings-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /usr/share/keyrings

Backup APT (backing up /etc already does this, I just like to have it in a separate file)
sudo tar -czf apt-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz /etc/apt/

Backup User configs (A separate copy of user settings)
tar -czf user-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz ~/.config

3) See the Trixie beta thread on how to upgrade rpios to Trixie:
viewtopic.php?t=389477
4) Copy configs back
5) Boot into Trixie

Flatpaks and snaps have their own directories that would need to be backed-up. Including directories in your /home and in /var, /snap.
If you extrepo the repo keys are in /var/lib/extrepo/keys, make sure you back them up as well.

Be happy. :)

Raspberry PI 500 Pi OS Trixie Kernel: 6.12.58-v8 Ram: 8GB DE: XFCE
Debian - "The Universal OS - One OS to Rule Them ALL"

Gavinmc42 wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 20, 2025 10:18 pm

SD, SSDs wear out and fill up with fluff, stuff I installed for testing or curiosity.
New OS, new SD/SSD.

I now have a case that can handle 2 x NVMEs, so the old files I still need will get copied to the new OS SSD.
Waiting for the release of the Pironman 5 NAS so I can also backup to rotating rust.
Trixie means new cases, new SSD, both should last until Pi6/Debian14.

Maybe you need a new brain as well. One with assembly bare-metal graphics floppy-disks flushed but info about partitions, cow filesystems, boot-loaders, multi-boot, snapshots, backups, volume manager, virtualization, containers, etc pre-installed. RonR and bls could provide. Or see viewtopic.php?p=2293564&hilit=armbian+rpi4b#p2292898 Btrfs and Zstd compression enabled.

Also don't forget that SSDs (sudo smartctl -x) will live longer than you. And that Ebon Upton promised that RPi will not have SATA. Rotating rust needs SATA, there are existing boards that do that perfectly or a 15 USD M.2 ASM1166 adapter gives you 6 SATA ports, so 100TB HDDs in total or so. You can use a PC PSU to feed them.

I have many old but still good HDDs, 2x 8TB in the collection that are operated by Debian 13 Trixie (custom Aarch64 kernel though) and cached on NVMe with LVM cache options. See RedHat docs for howto or just 'man lvm'.

Maybe you need a new brain as well. One with assembly bare-metal graphics floppy-disks flushed but info about partitions, cow filesystems, boot-loaders, multi-boot, snapshots, backups, volume manager, virtualization, containers,

Maybe, on the new brain, I am hoping the new HRM AIs will run on Pi5's to help me out there.
I do baremetal graphics and some of that other stuff already on old VC4 Pi's using Ultibo.

Worn out a few SD cards and 2 x SSDs by kernel compiling etc.
Mostly because I get small capacity, low cost ones and fill them which causes the big issues.

Got plenty of unused Sata drives and there are Pi5 PCIe to sata chips/boards.
Need to upgrade my camera system so those Sata Purple HD will get reused.

Trixie has some new versions of the CAD apps I use all the time for 3D printing designs.
Beats compiling them for Bookworm.
I did try to upgrade from Bookworm but I had issues and waiting a month or two is no big deal.

I'm dancing on Rainbows.
Raspberries are not Apples or Oranges

Any update on the release for Trixie?

saud wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 05, 2025 3:59 am

Any update on the release for Trixie?

libcamera does not work, at least not in beta test image 2025年08月30日, with a v1 camera on a pi3B+ that does streaming with mediamtx under RPIOS64 bookworm normally.
also TVheadend fails to show all menus in the webinterface

Debian13 itself works fine, did in-place upgrade a homeautomation server yesterday evening.
It was once on a real RPI4 and I used a Pi script to get Node-RED on RPiOS64, I think Bullseye, at least that is what I needed for some other program and still is needed.
So I kept the Debian Bullseye sources list (in the .d folder) just for some older packages, changed the bookworm into trixie, Also did apt modernize-sources. All kept working during upgrade, now I see PHP has issues but is a FireFox cache issue; flush it and no issues. I changed of course kernel to standard upstream/vanilla Debian and grub-efi as bootloader/manager when turned into a Virtual Machine.

Last edited by redvli on Fri Sep 05, 2025 6:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

saud wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 05, 2025 3:59 am

Any update on the release for Trixie?

See: Trixie images for testing - viewtopic.php?t=391129

But note that it says there -

this image will not be the one released when we officially release Trixie.

Beware of the Leopard