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The Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new version of their Raspberry Pi OS distribution for Raspberry Pi single-board computers that improves support for the latest Raspberry Pi 5 model, a new dark theme, updates various apps, and adds some new features.
The new Raspberry Pi OS release, versioned 2023-12-05, brings a new dark GTK theme that you can enable from Appearance Settings > System > Dark, enables the Battery Monitor plugin by default in the panel, and adds a new “Taskbar Preferences” menu item to the panel’s right-click context menu.
In addition, this release harmonizes the GTK+2 theme with the GTK+3 theme to improve support for Qt apps, enables monitoring of theme files in the pixdecor plugin to load changes on the fly, boosts reloading of on-the-fly theme changes, adds a German translation to Appearance Settings, and restores the shortcut to The Magpi website in the main menu.
For the latest Raspberry Pi 5 model, the new Raspberry Pi OS release adds support for serial port switching in both the rc_gui and raspi-config tools, and updates both the Mathematica and Scratch 3 apps to work on the new Raspberry Pi single-board computer, as well as on ARM 64-bit installations.
Among other changes, Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 adds support for identifying touch screens with unique per-device strings to enable a correct association with display devices, adds compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1 displays, improves Wayfire rendering, and adds the gpiod binary tools and python3-venv in the Raspberry Pi OS Lite edition.
Several core apps have been updated as well in this release, which ships with both the Mozilla Firefox 119 and Chromium 119.0.6045.171 web browsers (but Firefox 120 will be installed after the first boot), Thonny 4.1.4 Python IDE, as well as a new version of the WayVNC VNC server for wlroots-based Wayland compositors with improved support for encrypted connections.
Several bugs were addressed as well to improve support for USB audio devices, volume keyboard shortcuts, window titlebars when tiled, installations of local DEB packages, system updates, and the GPU plugin, as well as to fix some window manager crashes.
For more details, you can refer to the release notes. Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 is available for download right now from the official website or via Raspberry Pi Imager, based on the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” operating system series and powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1.63 LTS kernel series.
Last updated 5 months ago
