As you might be aware, the next Debian stable release (codename bullseye) is only a few days away.

But what does it imply for Mobian?

Bullseye on mobile

Bullseye will be the first Debian release including a modern software stack aimed at mobile devices, which is an important milestone in itself. However, development in this area is progressing at a rapid pace, and most packages in bullseye are already outdated, missing important features such as improved modem handling during suspend/resume cycles, or recent packages like GTK4 and libadwaita.

As Mobian is developed by a small team of already busy individuals, we have decided we wouldn’t support bullseye after it’s released and will focus our efforts on the next Debian version (codename bookworm).

Current users will still get updates from Debian throughout the lifetime of bullseye but shouldn’t expect new versions of user-facing applications or the mobile software stack. To put it short, here’s what you’ll get from sticking to bullseye:

  • security updates for the core system
  • minor upgrades to system packages

Here’s what you won’t get should you decide to stick to bullseye:

The way forward

Within a few days, following the bullseye release, we’ll create and populate a new Mobian repository targeting bookworm. Upgrading from bullseye to bookworm won’t be automated and will require editing your sources.list files: simply replace bullseye with bookworm in both /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mobian.list.

Notes:

  • if you originally flashed your device with an image older than April 26th, 2021, will have to edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/extrepo_mobian.sources, replacing Suites: mobian with Suites: bookworm
  • if you were using Mobian staging so far, you will only need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list: our current staging repo will keep being the entry point for all new and updated packages we upload

Please keep in mind that we expect a huge amount of upgrades to be flowing in the weeks following the bullseye release, with plenty of opportunities to break the system, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading ;)

Once the dust settles, we plan to move more and more of Mobian into the Debian archive with the hope of making Debian bookworm a first-class citizen in the “Linux on mobile” world.

The next couple of years are going to be exciting for all of us, so we can only thank you for your support, and we hope you’ll enjoy the ride at least as much as we do! :)