Early Adopters Invited to Try the Next Raspberry Pi OS, Built Atop Debian "Trixie"

Raspberry Pi is offering eager testers an early look at the next version of Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian "Trixie" — with official beta images to follow "in the next couple of weeks."

"After a lot of work updating packages and testing, we are now at a point where the packages in our public Trixie repo can be used to update a Bookworm image to Trixie," Raspberry Pi OS architect Simon Long explains. "On a [Raspberry] Pi 5 with a fast connection, the Trixie upgrade takes approximately 10 minutes to run. While it is running, you will be prompted to ask whether to restart services — answer 'yes' to this question; you should not have to interact with the process other than that."

The latest major release of Raspberry Pi OS, the company's in-house Debian-derived Linux distribution tailored specifically for its single-board computer and computer-on-module ranges, came back in October 2023. Based on Debian 12 "Bookworm," the OS introduced a major change: a move away from the X Window System to Wayland, bringing with it more than a few bugs and glitches. In the years since, though, these have largely been ironed out — and it's now approaching time to make the jump to the upcoming Debian "Trixie," which upon its official promotion from "testing" status will become Debian 13 "stable."

Long has confirmed plans to release official beta images, for installation onto microSD Cards, NVMe drives, USB storage, network booting, or the eMMC on selected Raspberry Pi Compute Module models, "in the next couple of weeks." For those who can't wait that long, meanwhile, he has provided instructions for performing an in-place upgrade from the current Raspberry Pi OS to its Trixie-based successor — along with a fistful of caveats.

"We will never officially recommend or support doing [an in-place upgrade]," Long explains. "Our recommended approach will always be to start with a clean Trixie image and to install whatever programs and data you need from 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," Long continues, "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."

For those who want to try it out regardless of the above warnings, Long's instructions are available in the Raspberry Pi forum; otherwise, keep an eye on the Raspberry Pi OS download page for the official images to appear.