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I ran into a problem like this once, and after banging my head against the wall for days it turned out the solution was just running
sudo apt autoremove
That took care of removing a bunch of old stuff in the boot partition that I will not pretend to understand.
Not having a separate boot partition is the way I roll, I think. The way debian stores old kernels even 1gb wouldn't be much.
Related to this, there is a note in the release notes for upgrading to Debian 13: https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#ensure-boot-has-enough-free-space
It mentions an increase in the minimum requirements for /boot partition.
With the size of modern linux kernels, I think 1GiB for a /boot partition is the absolute minimum I would go for a current full-sized distributuon. You'll run into these out-of-space issues on updates all the time otherwise.
Yep, infuriatingly installers often default to small /boot volumes, and if you want to change that value better say goodbye to automatic partitioning. Although, after trying to make the installer behave, giving up and manually formatting the drive, I finally got the push required to set up both encrypted root and encrypted /home on separate drives.
Currently I use an 8 GiB /boot, but I really think Debian installer should start making 2 GiB or even 4 GiB /boot the default now. Dumb to have the installer shoot itself in the foot like this. Ubuntu still does the same thing for some reason, as if we don't have room on the drives to fit a bit more futureproof /boot there.
Checking the /boot size on my Fedora install, I partitioned out a gibibyte for the 3 kernel plus recovery kernel setup, which takes up about 338 MiB in total. Depending on out-of-tree kernel modules and bootloader modifications installed, your initramfs images could be larger. A few things to look for:
If everything there looks fine and/or is necessary, you might need to expand your /boot partition (either reinstall if new system or offline partition shrinking, moving after a data backup if you have personal files you care about).
or offline partition shrinking, moving after a data backup if you have personal files you care about
what you are saying is: copy all your data to another drive, expand the boot partition shrinking the main storage drive and then copying back?
More or less yes, minus the copying files back if the operation was successful. You must be careful shrinking partitions as it is very easy to destroy them, and I'd have to guess the partition layout looks vaguely (EFI System Partition (/boot/efi), Boot (/boot), Root (/), ...), which would require shrink and move of the partition before or after /boot. If you're unfamiliar with shrinking a partition, a bit of reading into how it is done for your filesystem will be required. Different setups, ext4, btrfs, lvm, LUKS, etc. will have different requirements.
Use Gparted boot disk. It's a nice GUI program. It can resize partitions on the fly with data on them. It will move data within a partition if needed. I have successfully used it on XFS and BTRFS, YMMV. The usual advice of backup anything important is valid.
Although it's a bit dated, so I don't think it supports luks in the GUI. You might have to use it as a visual reference and do it via the command line.
is gparted better than KDE partition manager? or gnome's?
Haven't used those but probably pretty similar.