Bookworm will be supported for the next five years by the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.

This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as obsolete. 43,254 packages were updated in this release.

The overall disk usage for bookworm is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and comprises 1,341,564,204 lines of code.

Bookworm has more translated man pages available in Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All the systemd man pages are now completely available in German.

The Debian Med Blend introduces a new package: shiny-server, which simplifies scientific web applications using R. We have continued to provide Continuous Integration support for Debian Med team packages. Install the metapackages at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm.

The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with updates to almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap and planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now included.

Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to take full advantage of the security feature.
Debian 12 also brings read/write support for APFS (Apple File System) with the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms utilities, a new tool called ntfs2btrfs that lets you convert NTFS drives to Btrfs, a new malloc implementation called mimalloc, a new kernel SMB server called ksmbd-tools, and support for the merged-usr root file system layout.

This release also includes new artwork called Emerald, designed by Juliette Taka. New fonts are also present in this major Debian release, along with a new fnt command-line tool for accessing 1,500 DFSG-compliant fonts.