Plan your hardware refresh with the Debian release cycle

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.

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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.

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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!

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