The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new update to their Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS operating system, version 2024-07-04, that brings numerous user interface (UI) improvements and new settings.
The key highlights of this release include:
UI Enhancements
- The panel and PCManFM file manager now support customizing more than two desktops.
- The panel now supports customizing the Labwc Wayland window-stacking compositor, which is now installed by default as an alternative to Wayfire.
- The raspi-config utility now allows users to select Labwc as the default Wayland compositor.
- The piwiz first-run startup wizard now has the ability to enable or disable Raspberry Pi Connect, which was also added to the Recommended Software installer, raspi-config, and rc-gui utilities.
Other Improvements
- raspberrypi-ui-mods was updated with support for new touchscreens and systemd-inhibit support for overriding the hardware power key on the Raspberry Pi 5.
- raspberrypi-sys-mods received a new udev rule to allow users to change the backlight and larger swapfile size.
- The gui-pkinst installer now features whitelist support to restrict installation to specified packages only.
- The WayVNC VNC server now better handles virtual displays and encryption.
- The wf-panel-pi panel for the Wayfire desktop was updated with better support for smaller screens, keyboard handling, and dialog icons.
This Raspberry Pi OS release is based on Linux kernel 6.6.31 LTS and includes Chromium 125.0.6422.133 and Mozilla Firefox 126.0 web browsers.
