Raspberry Pi OS Improves Wayfire Rendering, Enhanced Raspberry Pi 5 Support

As a nice update ahead of the holidays, the Raspberry Pi folks have released Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 as the first update to their Debian-based operating system since the official launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 back in October.

That October release in addition to adding Raspberry Pi 5 support also switched the desktop over to using the Wayfire compositor for providing a Wayland compositing manager at long last for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. With this week's Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 release there are various improvements to the Wayfire rendering on the Raspberry Pi 4 / Raspberry Pi 5. The OS update also now does better reloading of on-the-fly theme changes, the GTK2 theme is better harmonized with the GTK3 theme to enable more uniform theming of Qt apps, and other desktop enhancements. Exciting many will also be Raspberry Pi OS adding a GTK dark theme option.

The Raspberry Pi OS update also improves Raspberry Pi 5 support with serial port switching in rc_gui and raspi-config now working for the new model. Mathematic and Scratch 3 software has also been updated to work on the Raspberry Pi 5 and using 64-bit software builds.

Also improving the hardware support with this week's OS revision is adding RP1 display support. Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 also enables the battery monitor plug-in, a wide variety of bug fixes, improved support for encrypted WayVNC connections, and updates many common software like Firefox and Chrome. This Raspberry Pi OS revision also moves to a newer Linux 6.1 LTS point release.

Overall this is quite an exciting and heavy update for Raspberry Pi OS ahead of the holidays. Those wishing to give it a whirl can find the new Raspberry Pi OS 2023-12-05 available for download from RaspberryPi.com.