Warning: Follow this method at your own risk! Read update at end of post!
Proxmox VE 9 has been out for a while, and it is based on Debian 13, which has also been released for a while. However, other than my main server (a ML110 Gen9) running on Proxmox VE 8, all other parts of my homelab are not standard installations. My Proxmox Backup Server has a concurrent Proxmox VE installation. My Fujitsu Celsius M740 Proxmox workstation that was installed with XFCE desktop on top of Proxmox VE 7 originally. For my main workstation running on a Ryzen 7 5700G, I had previously installed Proxmox VE 7 on Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 and then dual upgraded it from Proxmox VE 7 to 8 and Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 to 6. It was going to be painful to upgrade all of them to the latest version of Proxmox VE and Debian/LMDE.
Still, I knew I had to do it, and with a bit of time yesterday, I steeled my resolve and went ahead.
I used the official guides and my previous attempts as references.
Upgrade from 8 to 9 (for Proxmox VE)
Upgrade from 3 to 4 (for Proxmox Backup Server)
The actual upgrade process was more a case of changing the source.list files in /etc/apt so that they use trixie (Debian 13) instead of bookworm (Debian 12), and gigi (LMDE 7) instead of faye (LMDE 6). After which, I ran
apt update
apt dist-upgrade
Once again, repeated use of 
apt -f install
dpkg --configure -a
apt dist-upgrade
helped me to finally get everything upgraded.
The main server seems to be running stably on Proxmox VE 9 with Linux kernel 7.0.6. However, the main workstation with Ryzen 7 5700G suddenly rebooted while on kernel 7.0.6. So, I decided to roll back to kernel 6.8.12, which was previously running fine when it was on Proxmox VE 8.
The backup server seems to be fine too.
The Fujitsu workstation is not used much, so I am not sure how stable it is.
Also, for the workstations, given that they have the LMDE repos installed due to my love for having Linux Mint icons, I faced the same issue where Proxmox does not recognise the
version codename "Gigi" (which is LMDE 7). It causes the error message
"unknown Debian code name 'gigi' (500)" and so I had to edit /usr/lib/os-release and change
VERSION_CODENAME=gigi
to
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie I guess I should not have to do this again, hopefully, for a couple years more.
Update 22 June 2026:
The main workstation with Ryzen 7 5700G has been randomly rebooting, especially when Bluetooth is used. I don't know if it is a PSU, CPU, RAM, SSD, or upgrade issue, and I am now rolling back to a previous snapshot. If that works, the issue would be the upgrade.
Update 24 June 2026:
I tried to upgrade the main workstation with Ryzen 7 5700G again. It broke miserably. And when I tried to roll back, I couldn't run timeshift because the package broke. I had to reboot into a live USB of LMDE 7, but when I tried to run timeshift on that to restore the snapshot, it rebooted halfway. I suspect there is some package in LMDE 7 or Debian 13 that is causing the reboot. In the end, I used a live USB of Linux Mint 22.1 to run timeshift and managed to restore a snapshot. Given that something in LMDE 7 or Debian 13 is causing reboots, I won't be pursuing the upgrade path for this PC anymore.
Update 28 June 2026:
I booted up a HP T630 thin client using LMDE 7 live USB, adding the boot options
radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1
and ran it for 4 hours, with htop and nvtop running, a long YouTube video on Firefox, and glxgears too. I have also checked that it is a X11 session, not Wayland. It didn't random reboot... I really hope it is not a case of LMDE 7 or Debian 13 being incompatible with my AMD Ryzen 7 5700G PC... because that would kind of shut off the upgrade path even via a fresh install.
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