Seems the answer is systemd timers and that this is not new to debian 12. I thought cron was installed by default.

On Sat, Mar 9, 2024 at 9:06 AM Tim Moody <tim@timmoody.com> wrote:

On my debian 11 VPS cron.service is running and there is an /etc/crontab.

Same is true on debian 12 machines at home.

On my debian 12 VPS cron.service is not running and there is no /etc/crontab. However /etc/cron.daily, etc. exist and have scripts. In the past crontab also controlled daily, etc. Does the cron package need to be installed or is there another mechanism?