I had been thinking about when this launch would arrive for a long time. Two years ago, what was still known as Raspbian was updated to Buster in September, a little earlier than expected for the Raspberry Pi 4 to arrive with a new operating system under its arm. No boards have been released this year, so the company has taken it a bit more calmly in releasing the version of Raspberry PiOS based on latest version of Debian.
Debian 11 arrived in August, and the Raspberry Pi OS version based on it has been announced today November 8. Among its novelties, at least two stand out that we can see with the naked eye: on the one hand, all the applications have switched to using GTK 3; on the other, a new notification system has been introduced that has been integrated into the task bar, and each notice will be displayed in the upper right area.
Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye highlights
- GTK 3.
- Related to the above, the window manager is now Mutter; have left openbox.
- Notification manager on the taskbar. Notifications will be displayed in the upper right, and can be accessed from other apps.
- Updater plugin. When there are updates, we will be informed by taking advantage of the notification manager. I think this is an important development.
- The File Manager View option has been simplified.
- KMS video driver. This will greatly improve the management of the videos.
- New camera driver.
- New Bookshelf app, a PDF downloader.
- Most of the applications have been updated, such as Chromium which is now at v92 and will improve hardware accelerated video playback.
The best way to install this version of Raspberry Pi OS based on Bullseye is to use the tool Imager from the company, from where the new image will be downloaded and installed on an SD or USB. Those who prefer to download the image separately, it is available in the project download page.