Debian 13 “Trixie” is coming, closely followed by a new release of MX Linux, MX 25, which will lose some of its init-system switching abilities.
Debian 13 “Trixie” is scheduled for launch on August 9. Trixie will have the latest LTS release of the kernel, version 6.12, and will offer KDE Plasma 6.3.5 and GNOME 48.
After Debian 13 ships, various downstream Debian-based distros will follow with their own version updates. One of these is MX Linux, which is one of the most popular among the smaller and lesser-known distros. The team released MX Linux 23 back in August 2023, and the latest point release, MX Linux 23.6, back in April.
The developers have published a blog post, Changes coming with MX 25, which details some of the things users can expect from the forthcoming release, and the news isn’t all good.
One thing we could see coming even two years ago was that Debian will not offer a separate x86-32 edition of Trixie, and that means it’s also the end of the line for the 32-bit editions of MX Linux. MX Linux 23 will still get security updates from upstream Debian until June 2028, so this isn’t a hard cut-off like the one Windows 10 faces when Microsoft turns updates off in October. The blog post says: “antiX currently plans to continue providing an official 32 bit ISO,” so there may be some room for change on that front.
The first section of the blog post is entitled “systemd/sysVinit,” and that’s where we find the most worrying news. In its current form, one of the distinctive features of MX Linux is that it offers the ability to enable or disable systemd at will. This enables some convenient choices: for instance, you can enable systemd, install some package that requires it, and then disable it again.
Not in version 25, though. Apparently, MX’s init-switching abilities are thanks to an upstream project called systemd-shim by Kevin Nelson. This builds on a modified version of systemd derived from an earlier systemd-shim project. Nelson’s version now has a prominent warning:
We found additional reports of issues with cgroups v1 support in kernel 6.12 affecting OpenJDK 21 and Docker on Arm Arch Linux among other places, indicating this is a more widespread issue.
As a result, MX Linux 25 users will have to choose which init system they want. The project plans to offer separate ISOs, with systemd as the default “for maximum compatibility with the Debian ecosystem.” The KDE edition will only offer systemd and Wayland. There will be separate downloads of the Xfce and Fluxbox editions available with sysVinit. As the blog post puts it: “You still have a choice, you just have to make it at download rather than boot time.”
As long as you stick to the upstream Debian kernel, it will support Secure Boot – although some additional drivers won’t load without manual intervention in Secure Boot mode.
In our view, this is a very unfortunate change, and we rather fear that this might reduce the appeal of MX Linux for some users. We would have preferred to see KDE Plasma replaced by the Trinity Desktop – experimental ports have already existed – or some other lighter-weight alternative. ®