Or should I go 11 > 12 > 13?
Edit: Thanks for all the replies. I asked this out of laziness and apparently trying this is not a lazy thing to do. I’m not Bilbo Baggins seeking an adventure. Will go with 11 > 12 > 13 way, though might stay at 12 for a while at this point. You know, lazy. :)
Edit 2: Updated to 12. Haven’t checked all the configs yet but so far so good, at least every function I expect works. If I finish this checking sequence, I might go for 13 soon too.
Edit 3: Updated to 13 as well. It actually took shorter than updating from 11 to 12. Though for some reason Jellyfin is marked as obsolete, however it works and I couldn’t care less. My things are working and hopefully I won’t see problems. If I do, I’ll check them one by one at this point since it’s a small home server.
Gotta add this: I had 325 packages on Debian 11, and now I have 450 packages on Debian 13. Some of them are marked as obsolete but must review them one by one. I feel like this upgrade process brake my minimalism and introduced some bloat but gotta care about that later.
I’m wouldn’t do it. Debian isn’t something that likes big jumps like that. Consider an immutable distro if you want to be able to leap around that way.
I heard some people use openSUSE MicroOS as their servers but my servers were always Debian and I’m quite happy about it. Though immutable server sounds nice. But I wouldn’t consider anything until my server is completely broken, so there is that. :)
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!
11 > 12 > 13 is way safer!
This is one of those times I’m glad I use a dotfiles repo
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.
It would be great if more effort was put into ensuring a seamless upgrade experience.
I agree. It’s mostly fine but these upgrade processes could be much better.
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.
Well, if there are issues like even in normal upgrade, it’s better not to jump on a thing like this.
Still, it’s good to know that this is technically possible, though it’s not for a lazy person who just wants to update his server. Gotta check Debian changelog.
I did it by accident last week on a long running VM. It was rough because I also had the official docker repo as a source. I was stuck in a partial state for a while and only a lot of googling helped. Only recommended if you’re bored.
Likely not. I’ve tried skipping a release once by accident (I didn’t pay enough attention) and it ended with a bricked system and a full reinstall. Don’t do it.
For fixed-release distros (Debian/Ubuntu), the upgrade path is usually sequential.
The main implication: if you skip, you’re outside the tested upgrade path. That can mean broken packages, orphaned configs, security regressions, or a system that simply won’t boot. Sometimes you can force it and it’ll work, but it’s a gamble…
It seems nobody really tested 11 to 13, or maybe any kind of major-version-skipping and you won’t find direct experiences here.
Your best bet is to follow the official procedure, so 11 -> 12 -> 13. I’ll leave you with the official upgrade guide for 11 to 12 and 12 to 13.
It seems longer than it is, as not every step is actually required for every system. When upgrading VMs, a snapshot pre-upgrade can also help you skip backup-steps in the guides.
Well, certainly not gonna be a tester. If it isn’t tested, there is no need to take things further. Thanks for the guides by the way.
Major version changes for any software from the OS right down to a simple notepad app should update as sequentially as possible (11>12>13>etc). Skipping over versions is just asking for trouble, as it’s rarely tested throughly.
It might work, but why risk it.
An example: if 12 makes a big database change but you skip over that version, 13 may not recognize the databases left by 11 because 12 had the code to recognize and reformat the old database while that code was seen as unnecessary and removed from 13.
Stuff like this is also why you can’t always revert to an older version while keeping the data/databases from the newer software.
Yeah, that makes sense. Major changes in software are no joke. If it wasn’t my actual server I could’ve tried it though, could be a fun thing to pass time.
As someone who went through the 12-13 upgrade last week. Do not go directly. I had to rollback twice during the 12-13 upgrade(thank you timeshift) so I couldn’t imagine trying to run an 11-13 upgrade.
It’s a headless server, so I’m thinking “how bad could it be” but I would be more cautious.
