Hey everyone. If you're not aware, Debian will be concluding its General Resolution vote on the usage of LLMs by 23:59:59 UTC of August 28th. We are almost assured to get some level of traffic from interested people depending on how the results go, given the potential ramifications on both Debian and other downstream projects, so I've took it upon myself to make a megathread early. All other threads regarding the AI vote will be locked and redirected here.

We will also restrict discussion of the results on our Discord and Fluxer channels, see Tech Discussion on Fluxer OR #tech-general on Discord instead of the general channel on either (if you can't access either link, we have buttons on the sidebar for each platform. Both are bridged and can communicate with one another.

Results will be posted into OP by the time they are received. There are eight options on the ballot that can be viewed here in their entirety. A reminder that Rule 1 and 3 always remain in effect.

EDIT (8/28/26)
The results of the General Resolution has concluded that the winning proposal will be Proposal E: Responsible Use of Generative AI.

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/A-new-foundation-for-TUXEDO-OS-Switching-to-Debian.tuxedo

For those who may or may not be aware, Debian 12.15 marks the end of Debian Release Team, Debian Security Team and Debian Backports support for version 12. Ongoing support for some architectures will be provided by the Debian Long Term Support team supported by Freexian. Users are advised to upgrade systems to Debian 13 trixie.

Most importantly, Debian 12 is the final version of Debian offering a 32-bit release alongside a 64-bit release. You cannot upgrade a 32-bit install of Debian 12 to Debian 13 as Trixie does not support a full 32-bit version.

This will serve as a PSA reminder for those that may not be aware to not make support threads about Debian 12 32-bit being unable to upgrade to Debian 13. You have to upgrade your hardware to a currently supported architecture, of which i386/32-bit won't be on Trixie. The remaining i386 packages on Trixie are kept purely to allow users to execute 32-bit legacy software/code.

For context i switched to Debian gnome a few weeks ago and life has never been the same.

Everything feels faster and snappier all the hardware works like its supposed to. Somehow the performance of my gpu and ram is much better on the same machine with a different software. Linux revived my laptop and gave it a new soul.

Still I am going through the learning curve and any advice on how to make the usage smoother and my life easier would be appreciated. I am a software dev so i do a lot of coding and data management work.

Long-term support for Debian 11, codenamed "bullseye", ends today, 31 August 2026, five years after its release. Debian will no longer publish any security updates for it.

A subset of bullseye packages will continue to be supported by third parties under the Extended LTS program. Individuals and companies who want to keep running Debian 11 can contract with those providers and have the packages they depend on added to that set.

Upgrading to Debian 12, which has Long Term Support until June 2028, is free for all Debian 11 users.
https://www.debian.org/News/2026/20260831

As far as I understand running apt upgrade is not recommended without a apt update first. There could be an edge case for upgrade only. But giving that why isn't upgrade doing an update automatically by default with an option to opt-out for update?

Voting started about half an hour ago and you have to be a Debian Developer to vote, but the announcement and some information is here - https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/08/msg00002.html

CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/03/cern-moves-thousands-of-accelerator-control-computers-to-debian/5294312

comment: I just retired from an IS/IT job at a large Canadian telco where RHEL (with a support contract) was required for every "customer facing" server. We were allowed to use CentOS-7 on all "non customer facing servers" (eg. employee access only, application development, service assurance, user acceptance testing, etc) for more than a decade. When CentOS-7 EOL hit in 2024, we migrated to Alma-8 because that was what CERN was suggesting at the time. I have run into some problems installing EL-9 and EL-10 on slightly older hardware so understand why CERN is considering Debian. I wonder how CERN will deal with updates since (to the best of my knowledge) there is no ecosystem of backporting modern fixes into older stable apps.

Maybe I'll get it when I reboot my computer in a few weeks.

Hello y'all long time Linux user here I just updated my production machine to Debian forky.

Wow, so many CVEs!!!!!!

The election results have been posted on debian-devel-announce and we're gonna contain it over in a megathread for a couple of days. Congratulations to Sruthi Chandran on their election as Debian Project Leader!

Not Another 'Things To Do'! — a script builder for setting up Debian Workstation (ported from the Fedora edition)

Hi r/Debian! I'd like to share a project that started on the Fedora side of the fence — where it was well received by that community (200+ ⭐️ on GitHub) — and now exists for Debian.

What it does: NATTD is a web app where you tick what you want on a fresh Debian Workstation — system config, apps, fonts, dev environments — and it generates one transparent bash script you can fully review before running. No Ansible, no curl-piping mystery binaries into your system config: every line is visible and built from your choices. GPLv3, fully open source.

Debian-native, not a lazy port:

• APT-native catalog: Docker CE from the official repo, Vivaldi/Chrome/Brave/VSCodium repos, Steam with the correct trixie dependencies, and 60+ Flatpaks
• Verified against Debian 13 (trixie) in a real container — including packages that were removed from trixie: the multimedia-repos option no longer relies on software-properties-common/add-apt-repository (removed from trixie), Steam deps use libgl1:i386 instead of the removed libgl1-mesa-glx:i386, and the Ubuntu-only ubuntu-restricted-extras was replaced with libavcodec-extra
• ⚡️ Quick Setup profiles — one-click presets plus save/load of custom selections as JSON
• UX niceties — search-aware Select all / Clear all per section, selection counters
• Robust template — error trap with a ✅/⚠️ failure summary and a metadata header in every generated script
• Quality pipeline — pytest suite, CI, and a weekly "freshness radar" job that checks every Flatpak ID and download URL in the catalog against Flathub and the live web, so dead installs get caught before you hit them

Fair warning: this is the younger sibling of the Fedora edition, so treat it as v1 for Debian — I'd genuinely appreciate bug reports and app suggestions from Debian users, since that's the fastest way the catalog grows.

Links: - Repo: https://github.com/k-mktr/debian-things-to-do - Web app: https://nattdd.streamlit.app - Fedora original (for context): https://github.com/k-mktr/fedora-things-to-do

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

i installed debian on my HP pavillon laptop from 2020 after using zorin os and oh my god i love it! i use debian with kde plasma and honestly.... i dont wanna go to any other distro anymore after distro hopping for a month as a linux beginner...

Please keep actual discussion of this outcome in https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1vzqns8/megathread_debian_llmai_vote_results/ and our associated chat arenas.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-desktop/2026/09/msg00007.html

Dear Debianites

Since the original message didn't reach debian-devel-announce before, the deadline has been extended to 2026-11-26 (that's 2 months from now)

Apologies for any inconvenience caused!

-Jonathan

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:29:19 -0300 From: Jonathan Carter jcc@debian.org To: "debian-desktop@lists.debian.org" debian-desktop@lists.debian.org, debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org Subject: Call for Debian 14 (forky) artwork proposals

Dear Debianites

This is the official call for artwork proposals for the forky cycle. For the most up to date details, please refer to the wiki[1]. At the same time, we would like to thank Elise Couper for creating the Ceratopsian theme for trixie[2].

So, if you would like (or know someone who would like) to create a desktop look and feel that will be seen by trillions of people, be sure to send in your artwork ASAP!

Deadline for submissions: 2026-09-12

The artwork is usually picked based on which theme looks the most:

• "Debian"

(Admittedly not the most defined concept, since everyone has their own take on what Debian means to them.)

• plausible to integrate without patching core software

(As much as we love some of the insanely good looking themes, some would require heavy GTK+ theming and patching GDM/GNOME.)

• clean / well designed

(without becoming something that gets annoying to look at a year down the road. Examples of good themes include Emerald, Homeworld, Joy, Lines, softWaves and futurePrototype)

For more information / details, please post to the Debian Desktop[3] list, to which the reply-to for this mail has been set.

-Jonathan, on behalf of the Debian Desktop team

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop/Artwork/Forky [2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Ceratopsian [3] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktop

   ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀  Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
   ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
   ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋   https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
   ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀  Debian, the universal operating system.