Since the home page of Xebian insists that this Debian blend (not derivative!), “with only a thin layer for artwork and configuration that differs from Debian,” is “based on Debian Unstable/sid,” I have to insist on enlightening the plebeians: Xebian has two editions, and there are periodic “development” builds of them “in the staging area”: xebian-trixie-amd64.hybrid.iso (1.7 GB) and xebian-unstable-amd64.hybrid.iso (2.2 GB). So Xebian can be used to install a bloat-free XFCE edition of Debian stable.

❶ I have known this distro for some time, and those “development” builds are of constant quality. A newer build is meant to include the latest updates.

As a matter of fact, the only way to install the stable version of Debian is via the “trixie” ISO from the pending folder. The “non-development” build only tracks Debian unstable: xebian-unstable-amd64.hybrid.iso. An installation of Debian unstable can be transformed into Debian testing by changing the sources, but it cannot be converted to Debian stable.

❷ Xebian only adds a minimal number of packages necessary for theming and the user’s defaults. 100% harmless:

❸ When I installed from the “trixie” ISO, I used the build from May 4. The builds from May 11 already include the kernels that mitigate CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 that are part of Dirty Frag.

  • xebian-trixie: linux-image-6.12.86+deb13-amd64 (6.12.86-1)
  • xebian-unstable: linux-image-7.0.4+deb14-amd64 (7.0.4-1)

❹ As mentioned in my comment from the evening of May 9, I installed Debian 13 by installing xebian-trixie-amd64.hybrid.iso, and then I added a minimal set of packages I deemed necessary, taking inspiration from my notes from an older post that discussed, among others, Debian XFCE and MX:

blueman ttf-mscorefonts-installer libavcodec-extra gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-vaapi libdvdcss2 libdvdnav4 libdvdread8 ffmpeg yt-dlp youtubedl-gui nala fortune fsearch yaru-theme-gtk yaru-theme-icon

I could have installed Mozilla’s repo for the “true” Firefox, but I decided against it. I was a long-time user of Firefox ESR, and I intend to resume this tradition. I hate being surprised by changes in Firefox, and I had to disable “Open in Split View” in Firefox 149-150 because I kept accidentally opening links in a split view. Some people might find useful features such as split views and tab groups, but as long as it’s too easy to trigger them accidentally, screw them!

I also enabled Flathub and pulled the very minimum set of Flatpaks: Flatseal, Warehouse, Vinyl (as an alternative to Gapless). I should also add that I always hated the integration of Flathub in KDE Discover and GNOME Software. I prefer to explore Flatpaks on Flathub, then I copy the installation commands from there, and I uninstall them using Warehouse.

From the extra fonts suggested in the past here and here, I decided to install Amazon’s fonts, so I could set Amazon Ember in Appearance → Fonts → Default Font and in “Xfwm theme” or Window Manager → Title font. Then, for a monospaced font, a Iosevka font. There are 455 assets per release, so I installed an older version of Iosevka Fixed (33.3.3) but the current version is 34.5.0. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Debian Sid have fonts-iosevka in version 34.4.0, but not Debian stable.

After extracting the fonts in ~/.local/share/fonts/, I made sure they’re visible:

sudo fc-cache -fv

❺ I also added this script, so my Bluetooth would properly restore from sleep.

❻ From Debian’s mirror list, I opted for ftp.uni-stuttgart.de, an excellent server that I also used with Ubuntu. The file /etc/apt/sources.list being a “non-modernized” one, this made its modification trivial:

deb https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free-firmware
deb-src https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian/ trixie main contrib non-free-firmware
deb https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian-security/ trixie-security main contrib non-free-firmware
deb-src https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian-security/ trixie-security main contrib non-free-firmware
deb https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian/ trixie-updates main contrib non-free-firmware
deb-src https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian/ trixie-updates main contrib non-free-firmware
deb https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian/ trixie-backports main contrib non-free-firmware
deb-src https://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/debian/ trixie-backports main contrib non-free-firmware

Xebian’s tiny repo is declared in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xebian.list:

deb http://archive.xebian.org/debian/ unstable/
# deb-src http://archive.xebian.org/debian/ unstable/

❼ All of a sudden, I decided I’d like to use the 7.0.4 kernel from backports!

Since this isn’t a one-off event, but I need to have it constantly updated, I had to pin the whole shebang:

sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/linux-image-amd64.pref

I added inside:

Package: linux-image-*
Pin: release a=stable-backports
Pin-Priority: 990

Package: linux-headers-*
Pin: release a=stable-backports
Pin-Priority: 990

Package: firmware-*
Pin: release a=stable-backports
Pin-Priority: 990

After a sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade:

[ludditus@confucius ~]$ uname -a
Linux confucius 7.0.4+deb13-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 7.0.4-1~bpo13+1 (2026-05-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux

❽ Since the firmware package was split into two dozen packages, the useless firmware can be removed. I gained over 500 MB by purging the firmware I don’t need on this laptop:

sudo apt purge firmware-bnx2 firmware-bnx2x firmware-cavium firmware-cirrus firmware-ipw2x00 firmware-ivtv firmware-libertas firmware-marvell-prestera firmware-mediatek firmware-myricom firmware-netronome firmware-netxen firmware-qlogic firmware-siano firmware-amd-graphics firmware-brcm80211 firmware-nvidia-graphics

Note that you might need one or more of the packages printed in bold.

❾ I never encountered an HEIC file (I still curse the AVIF format, and I also hate WEBP), but I happened to read this: Fix HEIC images not loading in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Needless to say, HEIC files couldn’t be opened under Debian 13 by either Ristretto or gThumb! Also, Thunar couldn’t display thumbnails of HEIC and AVIF images.

The fix:

sudo apt install heif-gdk-pixbuf heif-thumbnailer

However, Thunar still couldn’t display the thumbnails! That’s because Tumbler, the background service used by Thunar to generate thumbnails, cached the failures, so it won’t try again until the cache of “broken” records is cleared:

rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/fail

Then, of course, I restarted Thunar:

❿ Obviously, I installed some other small packages: ristretto was preinstalled, but I added gthumb and, just to have choices for when I’m moody, both gedit and featherpad.

Then, VS Code. I’ll surely install more apps as needs arise. I’m still undecided about the office suite, which will be from upstream: onlyoffice-desktopeditors_amd64.deb or LibreOffice_26.2.3_Linux_x86-64_deb?

Finally, I tried, without believing much in success, hibernation. Guess what? Hibernation worked, with superb waking up! Yay! 🎉🥳

It’s been quite some time since hibernation worked on Linux on one of my laptops!

The perfect Win95/98/NT4/2k UX. I don’t need woke UI/UX.