Debian maintainers have long worked on Year 2038 compatibility and announced its completion with the release of Debian 13 (Trixie). This is based on the fact that Linux stores system time—and all date fields derived from it—as a signed 32-bit integer representing the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970, at 00:00: 231 - 1 = 2.147.483.647
This works until January 19, 2038, at 03:14:07! At that point, the field will overflow, and it will likely jump back about 78 years into the past from the starting point (1970), because the number turns negative upon overflow—or so it is assumed. Various ideas for addressing the problem were considered; ultimately, the decision was made to implement the variable as a 64-bit integer (x64 long). This will suffice for approximately 292 billion years, assuming this date is also stored as a signed value.
Last is a tool for viewing information about the most recently logged-in users. It displays not only the user and their login time but also the terminal used, their IP address, and the duration of the session. This information is retrieved from /var/log/wtmp.
The util-linux package contains several essential system tools—such as mount, umount, and lsblk—and therefore cannot simply be omitted. The last tool was removed because no agreement could be reached with its developers regarding the way forward.
As the administrator of a Debian 13 system, you install the wtmpdb package, which handles this functionality. It also creates a link at /bin/last so that existing scripts can continue to be used without modification. However, the file /var/log/wtmpdb is used instead of /var/log/wtmp. Consequently, when upgrading from Debian 12 to 13, the old data is no longer accessible, and the old wtmp file can be deleted.
Date values have long been stored using abi=time64. However, the developer determines which architecture (i386 or x64) is used for the time_t variable by selecting the appropriate ABI (Application Binary Interface).
As usual, comments can be made on the Fediverse.