Debian

Debian
Debian
	Debian Open Use Logo
	Screenshot Debian 13 "Trixie" running GNOME 48
Developer	Debian Project
OS family	Unix-like
Working state	Current
Source model	Free
Initial release	16 August 1993
Latest release	13.7 "Trixie" / 12 September 2026
Latest preview	14 "Forky"
Repository	deb.debian.org
Marketing target	General-purpose
Available in	77 languages
	List of languages Languages available in Debian-Installer: Amharic, Arabic, Asturian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bengali, Tibetan, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Welsh, Danish, German, Dzongkha, Greek, English, Esperanto, Spanish, Estonian, Basque, Persian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Kabyle, Kazakh, Khmer, Kannada, Korean, Kurdish, Lao, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malagasy, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Burmese, Norwegian Bokmal, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nepali, Dutch, Occitan, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Northern Sami, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Albanian, Serbian, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Tajik, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Uyghur, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional)
Update method	APT
Package manager	dpkg
Instruction sets	amd64; arm64; armel; armhf; ppc64el; riscv64; s390x;
Kernel type	Monolithic (Linux)
Userland	GNU Core Utilities
Default; user interface	GNOME
License	Free licenses compliant with DFSG
Official website	debian.org
Tagline	The Universal Operating System

Debian (/ˈdɛbiən/) is a free, general-purpose operating system developed by the Debian Project, a worldwide volunteer association founded by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. It is the second-oldest Linux distribution still being developed (only Slackware is older) and forms the base of many others.

It is deployed across servers, personal computers, and embedded devices. Among Linux distributions, it ranks second only to Ubuntu (a Debian derivative), with 16% of the overall market. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 11.4% of developers use it as their primary personal operating system and 10.4% professionally. Its emphasis on stability and long-term support over frequent package updates has made it prevalent in server and embedded deployments.

Development is led by the Project Leader and guided by two foundational documents: the Debian Social Contract, a summary of the project's commitments that includes the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), and the Debian Constitution, which describes the organizational structure. The project publishes three concurrent development branches: stable, testing, and unstable, which correspond to different levels of software maturity. The current stable release, released on August 9, 2025 and codenamed "Trixie", includes tens of thousands of packages maintained by more than a thousand active contributors.

Since 1997, the project has operated independently through Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit corporation founded by project members to hold its assets and trademarks. It previously received support from the Free Software Foundation between 1994 and 1995, with the sponsorship ending due to disagreements.