(Headline blog post below) I’ve always been aware of the Debian LTS and the ELTS project run by Freexian, and when my Raspberry PI PBX on buster went off LTS I tried it since I haven’t replaced that Raspberry Pi 3B yet. I don’t allow it to take incoming connections with just outbound trunks to my VOIP provider, so I’m not too worried about the old Asterisk and FreePBX software. And it regularly pulls in security fixes for OS packages from Freexian. So if you have a Bullseye project you want to continue using, you can switch to Freexian’s ELTS support which I’ve just done with my DVSwitch server which is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with AMBE hardware vocoder. So you don’t have to upgrade the OS unless your threat model requires it.
https://linuxiac.com/debian-11-bullseye-is-now-officially-unsupported/
Debian 11 “Bullseye” reaches end of life on August 31, 2026, after five years of official support.
By Bobby Borisov
Debian 11 “Bullseye” has officially reached the end of its life today, August 31, 2026, bringing its five-year support cycle to a close. Starting in September, the Debian Project will no longer provide security updates for the release.
Originally released on August 14, 2021, Bullseye received three years of regular Debian support. On August 14, 2024, the Debian Long Term Support team took over responsibility for security updates, extending its usable life for another two years.
That LTS period ends today. In other words, Debian 11 is now fully outside Debian’s official support lifecycle, and systems still running it should be upgraded to a supported release.
The Debian team recommends moving first to Debian 12 “Bookworm,” which is currently covered by LTS until June 30, 2028. From there, users can later upgrade to Debian 13 “Trixie” when appropriate.
During its LTS phase, Bullseye security coverage was already limited to four architectures: amd64, i386, arm64, and armhf.
Debian 11’s final point release was Debian 11.11, published on August 31, 2024. It was explicitly announced by the project as the eleventh and final update in the Bullseye point-release series, bundling security fixes and corrections for serious issues accumulated up to that point.
For users unable to migrate immediately, there is one additional option. A subset of Bullseye packages can continue receiving security coverage through Extended LTS services provided by external parties. However, this should not be confused with regular Debian or Debian LTS support. The Debian Project itself will stop issuing Bullseye security updates starting in September.
So, if you still have Debian 11 running on a server, workstation, or other production system, now is the time to plan its replacement. After five years, Bullseye’s official journey has come to an end.