HexChat dropped from Debian testing, two years after its final release
Updated July 22, 2026
Debian removed HexChat from testing today, citing release-critical bugs nobody is left to fix — upstream development ended in February 2024. Flathub has already delisted it.
Nothing breaks for anyone today. HexChat remains in Debian 13 stable, in Ubuntu, and in Fedora. But testing is where the next Debian comes from, so the direction is set: each release cycle from here on, one more distribution quietly stops shipping it.
If you are on HexChat, there is no emergency — just an expiry date that now has distro packaging behind it. The migration options are laid out in HexChat is dead — what to use instead.