Raspberry Pi has released a new Raspberry Pi OS update for September 2026, refreshing the desktop experience with a new dock, reorganized Control Centre options, a new screenshot tool, changes to the file manager, and Linux kernel 6.18.50 LTS.
One of the biggest additions is dock support in wf-panel-pi, Raspberry Pi OS’s desktop panel for Wayland environments. Alongside it, two new plugins have been introduced: an icon menu for launching applications and an icon-based task list for displaying open windows.
The 64-bit Trixie image ships with wf-panel-pi 1.31, while the new wfplug-imenu and wfplug-wlist plugins are included as versions 0.9 and 0.8, respectively.
Raspberry Pi has also added several dock-based layouts users can switch between in the Defaults section of Control Centre. In addition, a new preset for very large displays has also been added, as both wf-panel-pi and the X11-oriented lxpanel-pi now support larger 96×96-pixel icons.
In Control Centre, a new Dock panel handles dock configuration, while a Widgets panel now controls dock and taskbar settings previously managed through a dialog inside wf-panel-pi.
Notifications have been moved to their own Control Centre panel, replacing the previous wf-panel-pi dialog. Plus, a new Shortcuts panel lets users view and configure system keyboard shortcuts.
Moreover, the Taskbar panel now offers options to hide the taskbar automatically and prevent it from overlapping maximized windows. The Desktop panel adds an option to use swaybg instead of PCManFM for drawing the desktop background.
Another visible addition is a new screenshot utility. It lets users choose the default action after taking a screenshot, such as opening the image or copying it to the clipboard.
Raspberry Pi OS’s file management stack has changed as well. A new monolithic build called pcmanfm-pi combines PCManFM and libfm into a single application. Version 1.6 is included in the September image.
For external-drive handling, you can now enable or disable automatic mounting through the ejecter panel plugin. Importantly, PCManFM no longer mounts external drives automatically by default.
Under the hood, Raspberry Pi reworked the wf-panel-pi plugin architecture so plugins no longer require XML metadata files for default values. The plugin source structure was also reorganized to make behavior more consistent between lxpanel-pi and wf-panel-pi.
As Raspberry Pi continues consolidating its desktop around Labwc, support for the older Wayfire compositor has now been removed from the Screens, Mouse, and Keyboard panels in Control Centre. The Wayland stack has also been updated; the release notes say both Labwc and wlroots have moved to the 0.20 series.
Lastly, the update moves Raspberry Pi OS to Linux kernel 6.18.50 LTS. The image includes dedicated 6.18.50 kernel packages for both the Raspberry Pi 2712 and ARMv8 configurations.
For more details, see the changelog. You can download the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS from the project’s website. It continues to support a wide range of devices, including the Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, 3A+, 4B, 400, 5, 500, 500+, CM3, CM3+, CM4, CM4S, CM5, and the Zero 2 W.
Users can update an existing Raspberry Pi OS installation from the terminal by running sudo apt update, followed by sudo apt upgrade. However, Raspberry Pi recommends using sudo apt full-upgrade for system updates because it handles dependency changes that a regular upgrade may not apply.
