We have put a lot of effort into making the distribution upgrade seamless this time. You can read about these improvements in details here:
- distupgrade: Handle comments in sources.list file
- email: Add support for Dovecot 2.4
- performance: Handle install for trixie
- minetest: Work with new luanti binary in Trixie
- SOGo: add dpkg-dev to the package list
- upgrades: Run dpkg/apt fixes before dist upgrade
- upgrades: Refactor dist upgrade code
- setup: Fix issue with pending app update and force upgrade
- upgrades: dist-upgrade: Inhibit shutdown, drop unattended-upgrade
- upgrades: Allow packages to be upgraded from stable-updates
- bind: Keep configuration during distribution upgrades
- distupgrade: Use new configuration file instead of halting upgrade
- zoph: Fix upgrade to Trixie and uninstall
- sogo: Adjust apache configuration to work on Trixie
- setup: Improve package operations
- service: Notify systemd when service starts up
- upgrades: Increase distribution upgrade timeout to 3 days
- upgrades: Revamp distribution upgrade UI
As of now, there are no known issues with the dist upgrade procedure, you should be safe to just upgrade using the UI. To be extra careful you can still make extra backups of course. I would advise against using dd just because how easy it is even for experienced sysadmins to mix up the input and output options. I consider Clonezilla to be a much safer and robust tool for this purpose.
If you installed FreeomBox on top of Debian, you should wait until the next release lands in Backports, since it’s introdicing an important improvement specific to this type of setup.