How To Upgrade From Debian Bookworm To Trixie

Debian Trixie has been released into stable on Saturday, 9th August 2025. Based on personal experience, I’m seeing slight increase in IO speed as well as increased compression speed which is tested through Geekbench 6. In this article, we’re going to learn how to update from Debian Bookworm to Trixie.

The Usual; BACKUP!

No matter how insignificant you think the impact of the upgrade is, you must always make backup of your stuff before doing significant upgrade like this. Prior to writing this article, I basically broke my server during the upgrade and had to restore a snapshot after which I did it properly and that fixed the server. Whatever it is, make sure to backup your shit. Preferably through snapshot if its a VM to allow easy restore.

Changing from Bookworm to Trixie in repos

The simplest way of upgrade is using apt update & apt full-upgrade but before we do that, we need to change the repository from Bookworm to Trixie. This will be in /etc/apt/. If you have other stuff installed like Docker, Jellyfin, etc using repository, make sure to check the vendor and see they have Trixie support(both examples do).

Simplest way to check it is using grep while in that directory:

root@bruhcapital:/etc/apt# grep -r bookworm
sources.list:deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
sources.list:deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian bookworm main non-free-firmware
sources.list:deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
sources.list:deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
sources.list:# bookworm-updates, to get updates before a point release is made;
sources.list:deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
sources.list:deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
sources.list.d/docker.list:deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/debian   bookworm stable
root@bruhcapital:/etc/apt#

As you can see, there is bunch of mentions of bookworm. Go edit them one by one. DO NOT USE SED OR ANYTHING TO AUTOMATE REPLACING TEXT OR YOU MAY RISK BREAKING YOUR STUFF. Yep, if you have other stuff installed that do not support bookworm, you might brick it. Note that most if not all stuff that’s on bookworm should run properly once it is on Trixie as we’re making one step and not a jump. Backward compatibility is pretty good with Debian. Absolutely not speaking from experience.

Upgrade

As it goes, it is time to upgrade. First do apt update and then see everything is being pulled from Trixie and not Docker. It should show you that you have a bajillion packages pending update.

sudo apt update

Once everything is done, do this:

sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Note that just because you’re doing -y does not mean that you can leave your PC behind. There will be some prompts asked such as changelog reading, to restart service or not, to update config or not, and etc. I recommend not to bypass this as these usually contain good information.

Depending on how many cores, speed, IO and other factors, this is going to take its sweet time. In my Netcup 8G4C RS server, it took about 15 minutes to complete this step.

Cleanup

Just because this is cleanup step does not mean it is completed. There are few more optional stuff that you can do next. Autoremove non-needed packages left behind that are no longer needed after base packages are updated to support Trixie.

apt autoremove -y

Just incase if there was anything broken during installation, run this so that it is picked up. This will run a basic audit using dpkg on your packages and install any leftovers, if there is any.

sudo dpkg --audit
sudo apt -f install

In Trixie, the way source files inside /etc/apt is handled is changed. To update your repository to more modern format, run this command:

sudo apt modernize-sources

After this, you should now reboot and have new server take effect. Give it an extra minute than typical boot time so it freshen up itself and don’t panic. If it still is not booting up then maybe panic. Just restore snapshot as we had discussed in backup step above. Didn’t do it? Your fault.

reboot

Check for anything broken

If you are running more than few stuff on your machine, I’m sure something will definitely break. I’d be surprised if it isn’t. To check what is broken and what isn’t, run these commands. You may run them individually or all at once.

uname -a
systemctl --failed
journalctl -p 3 -b
apt list --upgradable
dpkg --audit

Conclusion

That should be it. I haven’t put in proper examples as I don’t have machines on standby but the above-mentioned steps are pretty much what I did to upgrade my server from Bookworm to Trixie.

You should not be feel compelled to install Trixie. Bookworm still has a long way to go. I did it because why not and I had backup to go back to. And I’m glad that I did. The performance improvements were worth it for me.