If your hardware upgrade plans coincide with the release cycle of Debian stable you will have the easiest time selecting a new FreedomBox with reasonably up to date components that will work with FreedomBox “out of the box.” It’s a good time to think about hardware budget now in March 2025.
Debian release cycles are fairly slow. At this moment we will soon see a change in Debian stable from bookworm to trixie. If you are thinking about a new FreedomBox a good time to do this is after the stable release change and here’s why…
- The previous stable release, bookworm, was June, 2023.
- We are almost two years into bookworm and and there is a lot of unsupported hardware that has been brought onto the market in that time.
- Once the Debian testing release, trixie, becomes stable many of these new hardware options will be supported in Debian.
I did not do this, so here is what my reality looks like…
- I would prefer to run Debian stable.
- My new hardware is not supported by bookworm
- I installed testing and it’s working fine, but I’m now on testing instead of stable.
- Soon trixie will be the stable release and I’ll want to change my release from testing to stable to get back on the stable release.
- I’m sure that this can all be done using apt, but I’ve never been in this situation and it sounds a little complicated. I never wanted to be this skilled with Debian releases.
- I’ll have to choose between “upgrade in place,” or wait for trixie to be stable before I complete the migration to the new computer.
You can save yourself that drama with just a little planning and patience.