It had just been a few days since, when writing the article on how to add support for flatpak en Raspberry PiOS, I thought it was time for the official operating system for the raspberry board to have dark mode. I have used these themes with gray/black tones since they began to become popular, and nowadays I almost don't want to see websites with black text on a white background. Luckily I'm no longer forced to see things like that or make changes on my own on the Raspberry Pi.
The latest Raspberry Pi OS update is numbered 2023-12-05, which is December 5, 2023, and the new dark theme It is undoubtedly the most outstanding novelty. But just because something is the most striking does not mean that it does everything for the better. The dark theme exists, but it seems like a work "in progress." What is certain is that it can improve, and only a few arrows indicating some points of the previous capture are necessary to realize it.
Raspberry Pi OS updates apps to newer versions
Less than two minutes is enough to see things like:
- The start menu button is not dark.
- The rest of the icons clash. It's not much, but you can tell that they were not designed with the dark theme in mind.
- Where are the buttons to control the Chromium window?
- The blue of the icons on the top panel is also not intended for the dark theme.
- The window bar has not changed anything. It doesn't look completely bad, like the icons and the blue, but it doesn't quite fit either.
The dark theme can be set from the appearance settings.
Among the rest of the new features included in the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS, we have:
- Linux 6.1.63.
- Consistency improvements with Qt apps.
- German available in appearance menus.
- More updated versions of applications such as Firefox, Chromium or Python.
- Various bug fixes.
- Complete list of changes, in this link.
For existing installations, all of this can be installed by updating from the terminal (sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade). For new installations you can read our article on the previous version, where we also explain how to install the operating system.