Upgrade Your Raspberry Pi Operating System: Based on Debian 12, Phasing Out X11

To match the latest Raspberry Pi 5 hardware, the Raspberry Pi operating system is ready, incorporating Debian 12 and other significant updates.

This new version of Raspberry Pi OS(Raspberry Pi OS) is designed to fully support the newly released Raspberry Pi 5news.itsfoss.com.

To achieve this, developers have invested a lot of effort and energy. The new system brings numerous improvements and marks a transition to a more modern windowing system.

Let’s take a look at their specific achievements.

What are the new changes in the Raspberry Pi operating system?

Developers have made significant architectural updates to the Raspberry Pi desktop based on the latest Debian 12 “Bookworm”news.itsfoss.com release.

Some notable new features include:

Clearly, you will enjoy the core benefits of Debian “Bookworm” while experiencing some of the new changes mentioned above.

Full Adoption of Wayland

No, you are not mistaken.

The Raspberry Pi desktop has now defaulted to using the Waylandwayland.freedesktop.org windowing system, officially phasing out the X11en.wikipedia.org windowing system, which is no longer used due to various limitations. The main advantage of Wayland is its superior performance on modern hardware.

This implementation is made possible thanks to the support of the Wayfiregithub.com compositor, which allows developers to maintain a familiar user experience in the updates.

Here is a quote from the developers in the release announcement:

If you boot the Raspberry Pi operating system on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, you will now see a Wayfire desktop. It looks almost identical to the desktop you used before on Bullseye, but behind the consistent appearance, we have done a lot of work to make the two desktop environments look the same!

We are not surprised by this.

Recently, we have noticed that many desktops are transitioning from old windowing systems like X11 and Openboxen.wikipedia.org to Wayland.

For instance, GNOME’s recent update has initiated a shift towards a future of full Wayland adoptionnews.itsfoss.com. Even Fedora Linux 40 is preparing to phase out X11 sessions in favor of Plasma 6fedoraproject.org’s XWayland approach.

It is indeed fascinating to see that the Raspberry Pi operating system has taken the lead in such a change 😄

📋 However, don’t worry, for users who still wish to use the X11/Openbox display system, they can re-enable it in the “Advanced Settings(Advanced Settings)” menu in raspi-config.

Significant Improvements in Network Performance

Building on the previously implemented NetworkManagernetworkmanager.dev network controller, developers have optimized it and added a network plugin to the taskbar.

Although the new version of the plugin looks similar to the old version, it has added an “Advanced Options(Advanced Options)” option, allowing users to access more features provided by NetworkManager.

Default Use of PipeWire

Now, the Raspberry Pi Desktop uses PipeWirepipewire.org to handle all audio/video-related tasks. It replaces PulseAudiowww.freedesktop.org, making audio/video processing more modern and flexible.

On the user side, you can expect optimized Bluetooth audio device management, lower latency, and better interoperability with Wayland, among other benefits.

Users can also choose to revert to using PulseAudio through similar steps as switching window systems.

Firefox Optimized for Raspberry Pi

This time, we have seen a Mozilla Firefox version officially supported and specifically optimized for Raspberry Pi, introduced for the first time in this Raspberry Pi operating system release.

Now, users can enable V4L2 encoding support to use the hardware h.264 decoder on their Raspberry Pi, which will help achieve better HD video playback.

Additionally, they have enabled Widevine DRMwww.widevine.com to provide seamless streaming experience on mainstream video streaming platforms.

There are also other subtle changes in this release. For more information, please refer to the official blogwww.raspberrypi.com.

📥 Download Raspberry Pi Operating System

Due to significant changes in the operating system’s details, developers recommend that you start with a fresh installation (re-flash your SD card).

Of course, you can also choose to upgrade yourself, but do so at your own risk.

You can visit the official websitewww.raspberrypi.com for downloads.

Raspberry Pi Operating Systemwww.raspberrypi.com

💬 Are you excited about the new Raspberry Pi operating system upgrade? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

(Cover image: MJ/2fe701cd-5ced-41e2-b00e-1454c6f3fa4a)