Lifecycle guide for Debian from Debian

All releases, patches, maintenance and support periods at a glance

All supported products Free Versio.io trial

📅 Last update on 2026-02-14

What is Debian?

Automate product release and end-of-life management

Debian is a Unix-like computer operating system that is composed entirely of free software, most of which is under the GNU General Public License and packaged by a group of individuals participating in the Debian Project.

The entire lifecycle of Debian

The following figure shows you the visualised product life cycle of Debian. You can see all releases with the latest patch version, the long-term support characteristics (orange flag in the green circle, the periods for version provision, maintenance and support.

Debian (Debian) release, version and end-of-life information

Figure: Release, patch and end-of-life cycle of product Debian (Debian)

What is the Debian release strategy?

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian Security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. Thus the Debian LTS team takes over security maintenance of the various releases once the Debian Security team stops its work.

Facts and figures about Debian

Product

Debian

Vendor

Debian

Latest version

13.3

Number of releases

Number of versions

104

Number of unstable versions

Number of versions affected by CVE

Licence

Debian Free Software Guidelines

Licence details

https://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines

Version command

cat /etc/debian_version

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian

Questions or interested? Talk to me!

Lukas Böttcher

Business Development Manager

P: +49-30-221986-51

M: lukas.boettcher@versio.io