Debian 13 Trixie Defaults for apt
June 14, 2026
I had a real issue with Debian 13 Trixie when I was converting the Raspberry Pi 4B I use for my Amateur Radio stuff from Ubuntu 24.04. I use sddm for my login manager when I install Linux, which would normally not cause any issues.
However, this time was an exception. I did not realize it at the time, but installing sddm the standard way brings in a dependency for the display theme that also brings in even more dependencies because it depends on a bunch of stuff from KDE. The default for APT is to install all recommended packages, which is not what I wanted at all. KDE does not run, or at least does not run well on a Raspberry Pi 4B, so MATE Desktop, my preferred desktop for Linux, never displayed after I logged in.
Here is what makes this a bad default. I asked for sddm. I asked for MATE. I never asked for KDE Plasma, and I never would have, because it cannot run on a Pi 4B. The package manager pulled in an entire desktop environment I did not want, did not request, and could not use, and it did it quietly, because someone decided that installing recommended packages should be the default.
That penalizes the people who actually know what they are doing. If you know exactly what you want on your own machine, a tool that silently adds things you did not ask for is not helping you, it is working against you. It buries the clean setup you built under packages you never chose, and then leaves you to work out why the thing you built carefully will not behave the way you built it.
That is the real cost, and for me it was steep. It cost me an entire day. A full day of chasing a broken desktop, reading logs, and pulling packages, trying to understand why a careful install was failing, when the answer was simply that apt had installed a second desktop environment behind my back. The problem was never my setup. The problem was a default that assumed it knew better than I did.
And a wasted day was not the end of it. By the time I understood what had happened, the machine was so tangled with packages I never asked for that there was no easy or reasonable way to remove all the cruft. The cleanest fix was to start over from scratch: a fresh image, the apt default changed first, and only then MATE and sddm. A default that forces a full reinstall to undo what it did without asking is not just a bad default. It is downright wrong, and it is inconsiderate of every person who has to clean up the mess it makes.
That one change is a single line. It turns the default off for the whole system, so apt installs only what you actually ask for. With it in place before anything else went on, sddm and MATE came in clean. No KDE, no Plasma, no black screen. MATE came right up.
A package manager should install what I ask for and nothing else. If I want something extra, I am perfectly capable of asking for it. The default should respect that, not override it.
Install what I ask. Nothing more.
The one line that fixes this, with the exact commands, is in the build log: Making apt install only what you ask.