The Raspberry Pi Foundation today released a new update to their Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS operating system for the Raspberry Pi single-board computers, adding numerous UI improvements and new settings.
The new Raspberry Pi OS release, versioned 2024-07-04, updates the panel and the PCManFM file manager with support for customizing more than two desktops. The panel also received support for customizing the labwc Wayland window-stacking compositor, which is now installed by default as an alternative to Wayfire.
labwc can now be enabled from the raspi-config utility and has theme settings in the Pixflat theme and configuration support in raspberrypi-ui-mods. Talking about raspi-config, the Raspberry Pi configuration utility received support for setting keyboard options and the PCIe speed.
The piwiz first-run startup wizard was updated as well with the ability for users to enable or disable Raspberry Pi Connect, which was also added to the Recommended Software installer, as well as to the raspi-config and rc-gui utilities to make it easier for users to install and manage it in case they need remote desktop support.
Raspberry Pi OS 2024-07-04 also updates raspberrypi-ui-mods with support for new touchscreens and systemd-inhibit support for overriding the hardware power key on the Raspberry Pi 5. On the other hand, raspberrypi-sys-mods received a new udev rule to allow users to change the backlight and larger swapfile size.
The new Raspberry Pi OS release comes with an updated Wayfire Wayland compositor that has been patched against a crash that occurred when opening multiple Xwayland windows and a touchscreen bug that occurred when touching areas without windows.
Among other noteworthy changes, the gui-pkinst installer now features whitelist support to restrict installation to specified packages only, pishutdown shutdown helper now uses the pkill command to close the desktop, and the WayVNC VNC server now better handles virtual displays and encryption.
The wf-panel-pi panel for the Raspberry Pi Wayfire desktop has been updated as well in this release with better support for smaller screens, better keyboard handling and icon highlighting for taskbar buttons, and proper dialog icons on the taskbar.
Other than that, the new Raspberry Pi OS release fixes potential buffer overflow vulnerability in the PiClone utility, adds brightness control for DSI displays and a more reliable method for detecting virtual displays to the ARandR utility, and adds support for configuring alternate keyboard layouts in the rc-gui tool.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that the PCManFM file manager was patched in this release against a crash that occurred during certain drag-and-drop operations. Under the hood, this release is powered by Linux kernel 6.6.31 LTS and comes with the Chromium 125.0.6422.133 and Mozilla Firefox 126.0 web browsers.
Raspberry Pi OS 2024-07-04 is available for download right now via the Raspberry Pi Imager utility and it will also be available from the official website.
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