The Netrunner team has announced the release of Netrunner 26 Twilight, a 64-bit desktop distribution built on Debian Stable 13 (Trixie). The release includes all current security updates and stable software packages from the Debian base.

Netrunner 26 Twilight desktop with KDE Plasma 6.3 running on Debian 13 Trixie

What’s new in Netrunner 26 Twilight?

Netrunner 26 ships with the Linux 6.16 kernel, going beyond Debian Trixie’s default 6.12 kernel for improved hardware support. The release also moves to the XLibre Xserver for Plasma X11 sessions.

On the desktop, KDE Plasma 6.3.6 and KDE Frameworks 6.13.0 deliver the latest upstream improvements. Audio is handled by Pipewire and Wireplumber. Several Netrunner-specific components have been rewritten for Qt 6 compatibility — including Samba-mounter (now using PolicyKit), a new SDDM theme, and updated Global and Plasma themes for Plasma 6.

Stacher7, a graphical frontend for yt-dlp, is included by default, making video downloads straightforward without needing a terminal.

Power-profiles-daemon enables dynamic switching between power-saving and performance modes. Hardware support improvements cover recent AMD and Intel GPUs, sound cards, and wireless chips.

Updated applications

Netrunner 26 ships with a solid application stack:

  • Qt 6.8.2 and KDE Apps 25.04.3
  • Firefox 140.7 ESR and Thunderbird 140.6.0 ESR
  • LibreOffice 25.2.3
  • GIMP 3.0.4 and Inkscape 1.4
  • VLC 3.0.23
  • VirtualBox 7.2.6
  • Kdenlive 24.12.3

Firefox and LibreOffice include translations for ten languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Debian 13 Trixie base

By building on Debian 13 Trixie, Netrunner 26 gains several system-level changes. These include hardening against ROP and COP/JOP attacks on amd64 and arm64, spell-checking support in Qt WebEngine browsers, and APT’s shift to the modern .sources format (.deb822). The apt modernize-sources command handles migration from the old .list format. The /tmp directory now lives in tmpfs (RAM), leading to more frequent cleanup between reboots.

If you enjoy Debian-based KDE distributions, NeptuneOS 9.0 “Maja” is another recent release worth checking out — also based on Debian 13 Trixie with Plasma 6.3.

Download

ISO images are available on the official Netrunner download page. For support and feedback, visit the Netrunner forums.