Apart from software updates, are there any significant changes? I didn’t see anything in the release notes.
In my opinion, the most significant change is the inclusion of nonfree firmware on the ISO, the detection of hardware that works well with that firmware during the installation process, and the suggestion to use that firmware. I also don’t recall having Cinnamon as a DE option in 11, but I could be wrong about that because it’s been a while since I last installed that version with a GUI.
Other than that, even though it falls under the “software updates” umbrella, I think the inclusion of a newer Flatpak runtime in the Bookworm repos is great news. Makes it a lot easier to use the latest version of Firefox, for example, without having to add other repos (for either Firefox or Flatpak).
Thank you!
Woohoo, congrats Debian team! I’ve been running Bookworm since RC and it’s been a great release.
Migrated to Debian 11 from Ubuntu 6 months ago. Loving it.
With Ubuntu I used to stick to the LTS releases and wait for a .1 upgrade. But I’ve been running a Debian 12 VM in anger (ie actually doing work on it - I needed PHP 8) for the last month or two and it’s been faultless for me. Might break the habit and upgrade the main machine early :)
Edit: almost pulled the trigger a little early tonight. Ironically the one package I have that doesn’t seem to exist for 12 yet is Virtualbox - not something I could install & test in my Debian 12 VM…
As the manual says you should run
apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))'before upgrading to check what non-Debian packages you have installed.
