Raspberry Pi OS, the recommended and freely distributed operating system for all Raspberry Pi devices, has a brand-new release based on Debian 13 “Trixie”, which introduces several significant changes and is now available for download.
One of the most noticeable updates is the new plugin-based Control Centre, which consolidates tools that were previously separate apps, including Raspberry Pi Configuration, Appearance Settings, Mouse and Keyboard Settings, Screen Configuration, and Printer Settings.
Alongside that, the desktop environment has been refreshed with a new icon theme called PiXtrix, two new GTK themes—PiXtrix for the standard look and PiXonyx for dark mode—plus a set of new wallpapers and a system-wide font switch to Nunito Sans Light.
On the panel side, lxpanel has been replaced with a forked version named lxpanel-pi, while unsupported plugins have been removed. A new System Monitor plugin has been added to the taskbar to display power and other system warnings, and there’s now a shared Clock plugin that works across both lxpanel-pi and wf-panel-pi.
Moreover, the Bookshelf app, which first appeared during the COVID-19 lockdown to give easy access to Raspberry Pi Press publications, has also been updated. Recent titles are now shown with a padlock icon, indicating they’ll become freely available a few months later.
Browser updates are also included, with Chromium bumped to version 140 and Firefox to 142. Under the hood, the release ships with Linux kernel 6.12 LTS.
Other notable changes include the addition of rpi-keyboard-config and rpi-keyboard-fw-update, the reinstatement of the SenseHAT Emulator in the Recommended Software section, and the removal of older tools such as Alacarte and the Remote GPIO option.
For more information, see the announcement or refer to the release notes. You can download the new Debian 13-based Raspberry Pi OS from here.
Image credits: Raspberry Pi Project
