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The official Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) has been updated and it’s now based on the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series.
The latest Raspberry Pi OS release, dated October 30th, 2021, is the first to switch bases from the old-stable Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” to the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series, and it uses the Linux 5.10.63 LTS kernel by default.
But the Debian Bullseye rebase is just the cherry on top, as the newest Raspberry Pi OS release features all of its desktop components and applications build against the GTK+ 3 open-source application framework for the in-house built PIXEL desktop environment based on LXDE.
These include the LXPanel and all of its plugins, the PCManFM file manager and libfm library, as well as the piwiz first-run startup wizard, pipanel preferences application, rc_gui raspi-config GUI, and LXinput keyboard and mouse settings app.
On top of the GTK+ 3 support, LXPanel got a new Updater plugin that’s capable of detecting and installing software updates on your Raspberry Pi OS, and offers progress and information dialog boxes, as well as icon handling code common to all plugins instead of in individual plugins. Moreover, the PCManFM file manager now features simplified view options for lists or icons, with separate menu option for thumbnails, as well as new toolbar icons.
In addition, the PiXflat GTK+3 theme has been updated with numerous changes to support the aforementioned apps, toolbar icon size setting was added for GTK+ 3, along with a new setting for indent for frame labels in custom style and the ability to request client-side decoration (CSD) on windows. Also, the Appearance Settings application now supports GTK+3 and Mutter.
Talking about Mutter, the window and composite manager is now used by default instead of Openbox on Raspberry Pi models with 2GB RAM or more. As expected, Mutter’s behavior and appearance has been customized to match that of Openbox, and users also get additional keyboard shortcuts, a screen magnifier, and some performance enhancements over Openbox, which is still used on devices with less than 2GB RAM.
Among other noteworthy changes, the new Raspberry Pi OS release featuers KMS as default display driver (with xcompmgr enabled for Openbox), an improved HDMI audio output selection, new default camera subsystem based on libcamera and demo apps, support for Japanese fonts in the startup wizard, as well as much-improved Bluetooth support with updated pairing and connection dialogs.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that there’s now there’s a new 4K version of the official Raspberry Pi wallpaper in Recommended Software, the Bookshelf app now includes the Custom PC magazine, the Chromium web browser has been updated to version 92.0.4515.98, the VLC media player has been updated to version 3.0.16, and various language translations were updates, including Armenian, German, Italian, Korean, and Polish.
Of course, several bugs were fixed across the default apps and desktop components to offer you a more stable and reliable Raspberry Pi OS experience on your tiny single-board computer. Check out the full release notes for more details on these bug fixes, and download Raspberry Pi OS 2021-10-30 from the official website, which you can write on an SD card with the official Raspberry Pi Imager utility.
Last updated 2 years ago
