We’ve just published a new version of Raspberry Pi OS — our recommended (and free) operating system for all Raspberry Pi computers — and it’s now available for download. Scroll to the bottom of this post to find instructions for updating, or read on to find out what has changed.

As many of you already know, Debian Linux works on a two-year release cycle – every odd-numbered year, a new major version is released, and it being 2025, there will be one in the next few months.

So this is probably the final release of Raspberry Pi OS which is based on Debian ‘bookworm’, before Debian ‘trixie’ is released this summer. The last full release we made was back in November last year, and there have been quite a few changes since then, so here’s a summary of the most important.

Screen locking

We’ve installed a modified version of the swaylock screen locking application. Anyone who has used swaylock will be familiar with its somewhat minimal interface – when you lock the screen, you just get a completely white screen with no indication of what has happened or what you need to do. We felt this was a bit unhelpful, so we’ve added a custom front end which gives a bit more feedback as to what is happening and what you need to do to unlock it again!

You can now lock the screen by pressing Ctrl-Alt-L, or by choosing ‘Shutdown…’ from the main menu and selecting Lock Screen in the dialog. You’ll then see the lock screen, with a password entry box.

Type in your password, hit Enter, and the desktop should return.

Auto login options

In Linux desktops, it is usually possible to access a command-line console (known as a TTY) by pressing Ctrl-Alt and one of the function keys from 1 to 7. We have always set up Raspberry Pi Desktop so that if you boot to the desktop and enable auto login, then the TTY on Ctrl-Alt-F1 is also automatically logged in. If you use the screen lock described above, this gives a potential security hole, as the TTY switches are not disabled when the screen is locked.

What this means is that if you lock the screen, you should need to enter a password to be able to access the Raspberry Pi desktop again. But if a TTY is also logged in, someone can just hit Ctrl-Alt-F1, switch to the logged-in TTY, and gain access to the computer.

In order to prevent this, we have now separated console and desktop auto login options. On a new image, both console and desktop are automatically logged in, but if you want to prevent someone using this to get around the screen lock, we recommend turning off console auto login. There are now controls for this both in Raspberry Pi Configuration and in raspi-config.

New Printers application

To connect to and control printers, we have been shipping the system-config-printer application, which is a Python application with a slightly quirky and untidy user interface. For this release, we have ported the printer control plugin from the GNOME desktop control centre into a standalone Printers application (along with fixing a few of GNOME’s more puzzling user interface decisions…). The new application can be found in the Preferences section of the main menu, and should hopefully make managing printers a bit more intuitive.

Better touchscreen handling

Touchscreen handling in Wayland is relatively new and sometimes doesn’t do everything you might hope. We hit a problem when we first moved to Wayland in that some touch features, like the ability to double-click, were simply not available, and we had to find a workaround.

What we did was to enable mouse emulation by default, whereby touchscreens just pretend to be mice – when you tap the touchscreen, it generates a mouse click instead of a touch, and if you tap it twice, it generates a double-click. The problem with this was that it meant that touch-specific features, like swiping the screen to scroll, were disabled, and some people noticed their absence.

For this release, we are making it easy for touchscreen users to choose whether they want mouse emulation behaviour, or native touchscreen behaviour. There is a new menu under the ‘Touchscreen’ section of the context-sensitive menu in Screen Configuration.

The main disadvantage of no longer using mouse emulation is that it isn’t possible to double-click by tapping the screen twice, and this makes navigation in the file manager rather difficult. There are a couple of workarounds specific to the file manager: you can enable ‘Open files with single click’ in the file manager preferences, or use a tap-and-hold to open the context-sensitive menu and then choose ‘Open’.

Hopefully, at some point Wayland touchscreen support will be mature enough that it is no longer necessary to offer this option, but in the meantime, this lets users choose their preferred behaviour.

Other changes

This release is running version 0.8.1 of the labwc Wayland window manager – this is a couple of releases behind the very latest version, but has had a lot of testing and is very stable. We’ll be updating this to a newer version in the near future. We are also now running on version 6.12 of the Linux kernel for this release.

The Squeekboard virtual keyboard for use with touchscreens has been modified to allow users with multiple monitor configurations to choose the screen on which it is shown – the relevant option is on the Display tab of Raspberry Pi Configuration.

Unfortunately, due to changes made by the authors of the Chromium web browser, it is no longer possible to pre-install the uBlock Origin adblocker. As a result of this, from this release onwards, we are pre-installing the slightly less full-featured uBlock Origin Lite.

A lot of work has gone into optimising the startup of the wf-panel-pi application used to create the taskbar in Wayland, and this has resulted in a noticeable improvement in the time taken for the desktop to start after the Raspberry Pi is booted.

In another performance optimisation, we have stopped using the zenity tool to create prompts and dialogs from the command line, and have written a more efficient tool of our own, called zenoty – this saves installing some packages which were slowing down startup.

There have also been a lot of changes under the hood aimed at making maintenance of the desktop more straightforward and easer to manage going forward into trixie, but they shouldn’t (hopefully) be noticed by most users.

And of course there have been dozens of the usual small tweaks to fix bugs, add new translations, and just generally tidy things up.

How do I get it?

As is usual, you can do most of the update automatically via apt. Just open a terminal and type

sudo apt update

sudo apt full-upgrade

While the upgrade is in progress, you may get prompts asking you to confirm changes to configuration files; just answer Y for yes to these.

If you want to write a fresh image to an SD card or other media, visit our software page, where you can download Raspberry Pi Imager – the most straightforward way for most users to prepare a new SD card – or browse download options to install manually.

We hope you find the new changes useful – as always, do let us have any feedback in the comments or on the forums.