Butterbian

Debian 13 · XFCE or butterknife · BTRFS + Timeshift — configured from day one.

✦ New ISOs — XFCE & butterknife — built on Debian 13.6 with a leaner snapshot stack and Firefox hardened out of the box on XFCE.
See the release notes for XFCE and butterknife.

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.

XFCEbutterknife
forI want a desktop to useI want to build my own
installerCalamares (graphical)TUI (Python + urwid)
live envFull XFCE desktopBare terminal
first bootThemed XFCE desktopYour chosen WM, configured
filesystemBTRFS onlyBTRFS, ext4, or XFS
firmwareUEFI or legacy BIOSUEFI or legacy BIOS
encryption—LUKS on BTRFS, ext4, or XFS
ISO size~2.5 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.

  • MacTahoe GTK, icons, cursors
  • Customized xfce4-terminal + xfce4-panel
  • Calamares graphical installer
  • 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:

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:

butterknife:

subvolume layout

On BTRFS installs, Butterbian configures the following subvolumes:

subvolumemountpoint
@/
@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: LUKS on BTRFS uses an unencrypted 1 GB /boot partition — required so GRUB can load the kernel. Snapshots and grub-btrfs rollback work as normal on encrypted BTRFS installs. Home-directory encryption on BTRFS without full-disk LUKS is planned for a future release.

requirements

XFCE edition:

butterknife:

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:

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: