3
11 > 12 > 13 is way safer!
11-12 should be well tested. 12-13 should be well tested. 11-13 may work, but you may be the tester.
I'd step through one at a time.
No.
By itself, apt will give you headaches.
Debian migrated to new paths for security non-free firmware in repositories from 11 to 12, and apt goes to v3 in 12 to 13, which changes the format of sources. There is a new apt modernize-sources command, but it assumes your paths are correct.
If you know what you're doing, you can do this by correcting the repo paths and do the without-new-packages upgrade, but be prepared to fix apt.
If you're a casual user, maybe stick with 11>12>13.
I know what I'm doing but looking at every comment here, it's not a wise thing to do it seems. So casual or not 11 > 12 > 13 is the proper and most likely still the easiest way. It's a good thing that I asked before doing some potentially mad thing.
Honestly, there were so many fundamental changes in the 13 upgrade for certain packages that I had to fix on a couple of machines that I'd be hesitant to try no-scoping the 11 > 13 upgrade.
I flew by the seat of my pants and managed to pull off 10 directly to 12, but I wouldn't do it for this one.
Hey. I'm going through this right now. My server was 11, and I wanted to go to 13. I definitely didn't want to get into a situation where the server required hours and hours of repair.
I'm halfway there. The upgrade to 12 went smoothly. The biggest headache was glances, first from the lack of web interface (which I was ready for), and the lack of RAID support (not ready). I might do the switch to 13 next week.
I feel like 13 introduced more changes than 12. By the way, I finally took the leap and upgraded to 13. Kinda YOLO'd though and it needs some fixing in configs but currently everything I expect works, so this will be a very slow fixing process I reckon. :)
Good luck with the upgrade!
Did you go straight there, or go through 12?
Oh I went 11 > 12 > 13. But haven't really checked all the configs from 12 to 13, there are many new ones too.
Well I finally upgraded to 13, a few months later. The only issue was the blob file in glances, which I was ready to deal with. Oh and I had to install php-mysql.
I don't like that you can't start the Debian upgrade and just walk away. It stops and asks you about configuration files, so you have to babysit it. Other than that, it works well.
That's good news! Mine had some quirks like I had to uninstall and reinstall Jellyfin and some couple things for some reason too.
But yeah, I would like some more automated upgrade as well. Though Debian itself is a manual installation so current situation makes sense.
Interesting. After I got the new Debian running, I just updated the source for Jellyfin (and a few other packages) to Trixie, and it updated just fine.
Yeah, no idea why it was marked as obsolete but at least I didn't have to meddle with configs for that. Maybe because of upgrading 2 versions in a row.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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