Butterbian

✦ Butterbian-XFCE 0.5.0 — optional full-disk encryption. Tick one checkbox in the installer, type one passphrase at boot, and the root filesystem lives in a LUKS2 container. Snapshots and GRUB rollback work the same either way. Same-size ISO — 1.85 GB.
See the announcement.

about

Butterbian is a Debian 13 (Trixie) installer built around one idea: your system should be snapshotted before anything breaks it. Most distros leave BTRFS and Timeshift as an exercise for the user. Butterbian does it for you — subvolumes laid out correctly, Timeshift configured, grub-btrfs wired in, so you can roll back from GRUB if it all goes sideways.

Part of the justaguylinux butter* ecosystem — alongside butterscripts, butternotes, buttertodo, and butterbash. butterrepo is available as a companion APT repository, providing Ghostty, Neovim, rofi 2.0, Zen Browser, and more.

Made by a bash tryhard, YouTube moron, and podcast wannabe who occasionally gets things to work.

editions

Same snapshot stack underneath. Pick the one that matches how you want to spend your evening.

	XFCE	butterknife
for	I want a desktop to use	I want to build my own
installer	Calamares (graphical)	TUI (Python + urwid)
live env	Full XFCE desktop	Bare terminal
first boot	Themed XFCE desktop	Your chosen WM, configured
filesystem	BTRFS only	BTRFS, ext4, or XFS
firmware	UEFI or legacy BIOS	UEFI or legacy BIOS
encryption	Optional LUKS2 full-disk	LUKS on BTRFS, ext4, or XFS
ISO size	~1.85 GB	~1.4 GB

XFCE · the full spread

Boot the ISO, click through Calamares, reboot into a themed XFCE desktop. Everything's already configured — theme, icons, cursors, panel, terminal.

Orchis (black) GTK theme, Colloid icons
Original artwork — one scene from boot to desktop
Customized xfce4-terminal + xfce4-panel
Calamares graphical installer
Optional LUKS2 full-disk encryption — one checkbox, one passphrase at boot
butterbash shell config

butterknife · choose your spread

An independent open-source archinstall-style TUI installer for Debian 13, part of the Butterbian project. Boot the ISO, answer questions in a terminal installer, pick a window manager from the menu, reboot into your configured system. WM configs come from the justaguylinux setup repos.

Python + urwid TUI installer (archinstall-style)
BTRFS, ext4, or XFS · UEFI or legacy BIOS
Optional LUKS (BTRFS, ext4, XFS) · optional SSHD
Chroot recovery built into the live env
WM picker — 8 pre-configured justaguylinux setups (dwm, awesome, bspwm, i3, openbox, oxwm, qtile, sway)

features

What both editions get when you choose BTRFS:

Debian 13 (Trixie) base — stable, no surprises
BTRFS filesystem with pre-configured subvolumes (see below)
Timeshift configured and ready on first boot
grub-btrfs — roll back from the GRUB menu
Automatic snapshot before every apt/dpkg operation
Apt snapshots pruned automatically after 30 days
zram swap — no swap partition needed
Offline installation — no internet required during install

butterknife can also install on ext4 or XFS. You keep zram and offline install, but snapshot features are BTRFS-only — that's just how Timeshift and grub-btrfs work.

theming

XFCE edition:

Orchis GTK theme (black variant) — near-black, flat, blue accents, matching window borders
Colloid icon theme — butter-colored folders (grey, purple, and blue variants pre-installed)
Original artwork — twilight wallpaper shared by the boot menu and the themed LightDM greeter, with cottage and lantern variants
Inter interface font · SauceCodePro Nerd Font in the terminal
Customized xfce4-terminal — GitHub Dark by default, with Catppuccin Mocha, Rosé Pine, and Tokyo Night presets
Customized xfce4-panel — Butterbian glyph menu, single-line clock, clipboard history (Super+V)

butterknife:

Optional Butterbian-themed lightdm-gtk-greeter (line-art wallpaper, "b" avatar) — opt-in during install
No desktop theming — each WM config brings its own look
Theming lives with the WM setup repo you pick at first login

subvolume layout

On BTRFS installs, Butterbian configures the following subvolumes:

subvolume	mountpoint
@	/
@home	/home
@var_log	/var/log
@var_cache	/var/cache
@var_tmp	/var/tmp

@var_log, @var_cache, and @var_tmp are separate so they are excluded from Timeshift snapshots automatically. No cruft in your rollbacks.

Note: /boot lives on its own small unencrypted partition, so GRUB can load the kernel without an unlock prompt on encrypted installs. Snapshots and grub-btrfs rollback work as normal, but kernels sit outside your snapshots — if you roll back past a kernel upgrade, pick the matching older kernel from the GRUB snapshot menu.

requirements

XFCE edition:

UEFI or legacy BIOS
64-bit (amd64) CPU
4 GB RAM minimum
20 GB disk space

butterknife:

UEFI or legacy BIOS
64-bit (amd64) CPU
2 GB RAM minimum
10 GB disk space (more if you're installing a heavy WM stack)

butterrepo

butterrepo is a community APT repository providing fresh, GPG-signed packages for Debian users — no tracking, no analytics. It is pre-configured on both Butterbian editions, so packages are available immediately after install.

Available packages:

fzf
Geany + plugins
Ghostty
Helium Browser
ly (display manager)
Neovim (built from source)
picom
rofi 2.0
Zen Browser

Also works standalone on Debian 12+, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS+, and other Debian-based distros.

download

$ wget get.butterbian.org

Both XFCE and butterknife ISOs are available there.

issues & feedback

Found a bug, hit a problem during install, or have a feature request? Open an issue on Butterforge — XFCE · butterknife. Sign in with your Codeberg account to post.

support

Butterbian is built and maintained by one person in spare time. If it saved you an evening of subvolume wrangling, there's a tip jar:

Buy me a coffee