about
Butterbian is a Debian 13 (Trixie) live ISO 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.
Ships with XFCE. Part of the justaguylinux butter* ecosystem — alongside butterscripts, butternotes, and buttertodo. 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.
features
- Debian 13 (Trixie) base — stable, no surprises
- XFCE desktop — fast, stays out of your way
- BTRFS filesystem with pre-configured subvolumes
- Timeshift configured and ready on first boot
- grub-btrfs — roll back from the GRUB menu
- Automatic snapshot before every apt/dpkg operation
- zram swap — no swap partition needed
- Offline installation — no internet required during install
subvolume layout
Butterbian configures the following BTRFS subvolumes at install time:
| subvolume | mountpoint |
|---|---|
| @ | / |
| @home | /home |
| @snapshots | /.snapshots |
| @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.
download
Coming soon. Check back here or watch the YouTube channel for the announcement.
links
- Codeberg — source code and projects
- YouTube — tutorials and guides
- Mastodon — @justaguylinux@fosstodon.org
- butterrepo — community APT repository
- wiki — documentation and guides