On 31 August 2026, Debian 11 “Bullseye” reached its End of Life (EOL) after five years. That also ends the extended maintenance by the Debian LTS team – as of September 2026 there are no more official security updates. Anyone still running Bullseye now operates servers and desktops without patches for newly discovered flaws.
What EOL actually means
Bullseye was released on 14 August 2021 and first ran through three years of regular support before the LTS team took over on 14 August 2024. That phase ended for good on 31 August 2026. “End of Life” means: no more security updates, no bug fixes and no official advisories. Known and new vulnerabilities alike stay open – a steadily growing risk for internet-facing services.
The recommended upgrade path
Debian advises moving to Debian 12 “Bookworm”, which as oldstable still receives LTS maintenance until 30 June 2028. The current stable release is already Debian 13 “Trixie” (first released 9 August 2025, now at point release 13.6 from July 2026). Debian does not support skipping releases, however: from Bullseye you go to Bookworm first, then separately on to Trixie.
- Take a backup, then switch the
sources.listfrombullseyetobookworm. - Kick off the upgrade with
apt update && apt full-upgradeand finish the distribution upgrade. - Afterwards, optionally continue to Debian 13 “Trixie”.
- Where an immediate upgrade is impossible: consider commercial Extended LTS (Freexian) for selected packages.
Sources: Debian Project – LTS EOL announcement, Debian “trixie” release info, Linuxiac, TuxCare.
