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.
I think the hardware situation is less than optimal for non-technical users. It is hard to pick hardware that works for all the demanding apps (matrix, nextcloud, etc.). For more than year, we have been discussing for a while ways to offer easy to buy hardware like Pioneer Edition but with more powerful hardware.
To that extent, I am working on building and shipping amd64 based hardware with 16GB RAM, a capable CPU, and RAID with at least 1TB or storage for users who can’t or don’t want to build their own machines like these. I hope to make this available, at least in the US, in about 2-3 months coinciding with the next Debian stable release.
That sounds like a nice option you’re making. I hope you’re able to get that done at a value price point. Many of the preinstalled options look great to me, but I think they are low volume operators and their effort becomes a big piece of the price. I’d really like a librem or tuxbook, but in the end I bought the big brand and fought through the details. It’s fine if you like that sort of thing, but for many users - or first time users, it becomes a monumental effort.
I also learned that my vendor had certified linux units available, but only after I didn’t buy one of those. It’s okay - I enjoy the little ceremony of formatting the Windows installation before ever booting it. I shake my tiny fist at The ManTM. I also note that Debian is blacklisted in the as-shipped secure boot configuration.
For those that like the details I just learned that you are more likely to have a compatible computer the day after the distribution upgrade than the day before. Even if it is the same computer!