Upgrade Debian GNU/Linux from Buster to Bullseye

By | May 19, 2021

There’s no planned release date for Debian 11 yet, but Debian is well-known for its stability, and Debian 11 entered the final release stage, so no harm to try it especially for personal use.

To a certain extent Debian GNU/Linux is a rolling release distribution, you can just edit the APT source to get the packages from a newer version, effectively upgraded the Debian version.

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Each Debian GNU/Linux release has its name, all the names are Toy Story characters. Debian 10 is Buster and Debian 11 is Bullseye, so just replace all buster with bullseye.

%s/buster/bullseye/g

However, it’s a little bit tricky, Debian team changed the debian-security repository from <distro name>/updates to <distro name-security>, so we need one step more.

 %s/bullseye\/updates/bullseye-security/g

Finally, save and exit, then use apt or apt-get to update as usual.