Way tooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Awesome!!

Good work!

Changes to a desktop theme are often overlooked in place of adding more functionality, but the tweaks that have been applied to the Raspbian desktop over time have made the desktop look much more professional.

I also think the change to Chromium is a big positive step. Whilst Epiphany is a fast browser, it didn’t work with all sites and visiting a non-working site could be frustrating.

I’m looking forward to updating to the new image.

Looks like some excellent improvements. Well done. Can’t wait to give it a spin :)

Is this ‘just’ a new theme for LXDE which will continue to track upstream changes or is it a fork? Is the plan to follow LXDE as it moves towards LXQt?

Great stuff. I’d be trying it right now but the zip download links currently give 404 errors …

This looks like it could be quite good. Whats the performance like on an original Model B Pi?

I don’t understand why you’ve made a boot splash screen that says “Welcome to PIXEL” though. Booting has nothing to do with the desktop environment. If someone changes the desktop environment they’re still going to get that a boot splash screen that says “Welcome to PIXEL”.

Boot up messages.
While the prettiness is nice(And the version is good). Please make it easy/trivial to switch back to the original messages(Maybe in the pi config program? Some debug options? Instead of having to edit grub config files).
The ‘cryptic’ messages are often the first signs of any problems and the best way to solve boot and startup problems when things go wrong. Plus it’s very reassuring for me to see them flow as it boots up.

You could have taken liberty with the spelling and called it PIXLE, Pi Improved Xwindows Lightweight Environment.

Do the kernel+firmware for this release of Raspbian change the beta/experimental status of msd and network booting?

Nice feature enhancements. Wireless power switching and chromium are my favorites.

Hi Simon. Great work, as always. Is it possible to have an option NOT to have the splash screen? As someone else has said, they often provide an insight into things going wrong. Alternatively, it might be a good idea to tell people how to access to the messages generated so they can have a look :-)

Hope to give this a try later as a fresh image and an update.

One little thing,
In the now old version I have on the Pi, it has not internet access so does not set it’s time.
I though like most OS’s I could click on the time on the taskbar and set it, but there is no option. I couldn’t find an option anywhere to set it.
I’m assuming there is not one (in the GUI at least)
– In Pixel, is this standard feature there (in settings and just on the clock itself ?)

If so, this SD card is going home and getting updated.

Any updates on Wayland/Weston integration?

Hi Simon, I agree with Electra, whilst I really appreciate all the time and effort you have put into this the Pi isn’t something designed to look like windows or mac. It’s Linux with it’s great flexibility and learning potential. Hiding away the booting screen where you can see problems and processes goes against the spirit of the Pi.
Clear fonts great, other eye candy like rounded borders, people can fit if they want and the more you add the more can go wrong, Plymouth is not needed. Yes a version number is such a good idea and many don’t use that and the menu system looks nice and clear.
Best wishes to you.

Hello!
Is this desktop going to be usable on model A ?

Great to move to a more standard browser with chromium.
Epiphany was increasingly old and buggy – replacing it was always my first job on install…

All nice pretty changes, not sure on removing “cryptic boot messages” – they are a standard part of linux and raspberry pi is supposed to be educating users, not hiding details – that is the way of apple.

Chromium! Fantastic news!

I’ve been manually add chromium to builds for my Code Club and the Guildford Pi Jam for a while now, this is going to save me a lot of time. The new desktop looks awesome, thank you and everybody else involved (especially the community) for your hard work – the experience has improved so much! :)

Great stuff I love the Pi in all its forms …I also loved my ZX81 back in the day too !!! Glad to hear of the improvements and hopefully a better browser Ive been using ‘Iceweasel’ which has been ok too

The ZIP file is saying it is >800 petaBytes when unzipped.
Downloaded twice from downloads page and also from http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2016-09-28/
All of them have the same problem.

Has anyone else seen this?

Follow up.
Windows built-in ZIP capability reporting >800PB

Using 7Zip on Windows will expand the ZIP file.

Is it possible NOT to install this ? I prefer consistency across multiple platforms rather than having each look distinctive.

Are we given the option to change the splash screen? A custom splash screen would be great for integrated environments.

I’m fully in support of hiding the cryptic startup messages. They scroll past far too quickly to read and are utterly meaningless to newcomers. I’m crusty enough to rather enjoy the throwback appeal, but I can’t see how it serves the primary use case for the Pi.

The new desktop photography is beautiful, really spectacular. Hardly necessary, but… damn, that’s good photography.

Is there a way to temporarily hide/show the splash screen? PiBakery has a status screen which shows which blocks are being processed, and I’m wondering if it will conflict with this.

Nice work though – the new look makes Raspbian look much more modern and sleek! I’ll be pushing out an update for PiBakery with this version soon.

Are there any updates for people who just use the CLI in our projects

WOOOOOoooow!!!!
Took me an hour to install.
Thanks!

Amazing work on the OS! Looks very nice!

I particularly like the larger grab handles for resizing and the inclusion of Infinality patches (btw. newest FreeType works similarly: https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.html)

Thank you again for the hard work!

I did the dist-upgrade and I have now a black screen on my monitor and on the vnc server a grey-dotted screen. Anyone knows how to solve this?

Also, for MacOS the `tar -xf used to work, no need for Unarchiver…

Looks like a great set of updates! :-)

However I wonder if the “09/16” in the splashscreen (which is perhaps easy to misinterpret – Americans might read it as September 16th?) should be changed to “September 2016” so that it matches the Version displayed on https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Wonderful update, I love this, so wonderful to see successful home made things, to inspire us all.

I don’t use the desktop on a Pi, but it’s still very cool to know should I choose to, it’s been improved.

After updating, I get the new desktop/window look for all accounts over xrdp except root. Is it not intended to update for root as well?

hot damn!!!

Thanks for the hard work& also nice to read about the process for someone really interested in interface design! One remark about the ‘cryptic’ boot messages: the Rpi was my first real Linux experience and the messages learned me a lot. I understand the philosophy behind hiding them since for most of the users they are irrelevant and add clutter & complexity, but they also signify some of the hardware differences between the pi and pc’s. With the messages I was able to efficiently Google and solve pi specific problems I would have never guessed existed. For me the messages also served as an invite to look deeper into the OS, and I believe the strength of raspbian is closing the gap between a black box usable desktop vs embedded programming.

It is XwindoW, not XwindowS.

Hi, good stuff. Slightly off topic but have you (Pi organisation) thought about nudging your new users into entering a different user and password when installing/first booting? Unchanged default passwords on IOT devices seems to be the new weapon of cyber criminals. http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/51726/cyber-crime/ovh-hit-botnet-iot.html

Does anyone know the command to switch off wifi and blutooth?

Congratulations ! Nice to see that changes are getting the Raspberry Pi more and more usable as a regular workstation ;)

Next time : user interface fully hardware accelerated :D
I’m still dreaming since Wayland on Pi demos posted here few years ago :’)

Finally! Chromium by default and hardware acceleration support built-in! I wish more distros would do this, but at this point, I’d say Raspbian w/ “Pixel” is the best.

AWESOME JOB

I just try to update;the menu bar does not load;it appears and disappears: Small exemple : http://sendvid.com/n7lx0073

(rpi 1)

This is really great work and the improvements, for me, make it a far more satisfactory experience far exceeding the offerings from the likes of Apple or Microsoft.

Hopefully it will become more widely accepted as the desktop environment for other Linux distributions.

Richard
r

Hello Simon, I’m having some problems with the theme, i used dist-upgrade and after the reboot, the Pixel image appears and it auto logs me in, it seems to have the GNOME theme i installed from the Theme and Appearance Settings, the icon themes currently shows: Adwaita, Gnome, nuoveXT 2.2 and PIX which looks similar to this new one.
I can’t find the option to set the theme to default in the settings.

I’ll have to backup my things and download it again and use PiBakery this time to setup a bit quicker onto my offical 7inch Display :)

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!!

excellent update! The chromium browser seems faster than the old epipany browser ..all this for $35! Simply amazing! I never thought this could become a “desktop replacement” but it sure seems headed this way! :-) thanks again
-don

Great news. Now i have too hurry to get My R Pi 3 fr.o.m. The store.

Thanks so much for all the excellent work! Enjoyed the article, but I’m wondering how Pixel will work on smaller screens (looks like all the examples are on full sized monitors). I frequently use the Raspberry Pi LCD monitor and even smaller LCD touch screen on RPi projects. The main issue has been certain windows were fixed size and too big to display. Will Pixel improve that situation? Thanks again!

Looks awesome! I might even use it for my pc because it looks cute

Awesome! i really like this new design.

I was a bit shocked at first.. i was in the middle of installing the 7″ touchscreen and did a dist-upgrade not knowing of this update. so when i booted back in i dropped my jaw wondering if i was in another computer :)

This is fantastic, thank you! Is it wrong to be most excited about the new grippy grab handles?

Love the new look! Still investigating the other changes. I was under the impression that RealVNCServer would let us run Minecraft in a VNC viewer. https://www.realvnc.com/news/realvnc-enables-minecraft-raspberry-pi-be-played-remotely-first-time/
but it’s not working for me. I can VNC in, it’s no longer tightvncserver so the install worked. But no minecraft.

Nice work, but must everything now be named pixel (this is new branding for Google devices, yes?…and name of older Chromebook) Thus will make it harder to search for your product and support online. Would have been better to spell it differently or otherwise use unique name.

MATE DE is to resource hungry for the original Raspberry Pi’s and ZERO, which have 256/512 Memory.

Apologies if this has already been the answered – Is Pixel currenlty available via NOOBS?

NO BOOT AFTER SUDO REBOOT!!!!
What is happening ? I see no image, nothing !!!

After the Welcome screen I get a blinking cursor. No gui at all. I can log in through ssh but no working desktop. Thoughts?

Wow! I install pixel onto my RPi3 and am instantly impressed!

To Like:
– Windows are clean and have subtle rounded corners.
– Icons are fresh, modern and easy-to-see.
– No noticeable slow-down in end-user performance

To Dislike:
– (ok, one nit… the temperature monitor still has no option for Fahrenheit… still making me *calculate* in my head…)

I upgraded from the May/Jun version of raspbian using the above instructions (via xrdp if that matters) and upon rebooting I have no start menu – just the pretty background and a Trash can.
Ideas???

Hi can you explain this command.
sudo apt-get install -y python-sense-emu-doc realvnc-vnc-viewer
I already have tightvncserver and I don’t want to install the app or a different app again.I think it says install python emulator document not sure about the realvnc-viewer part.
Thanks

In my mind, the Epiphany browser should be accessible in the menu along with Chromium. Or at least as an icon on the desktop. This would make it easier to access than to take an extra step of going to the console and activating it from there. Many Linux systems I use have 3 or more browers accessible in this manner.

Pixel is a great idea but I’m scratching my head on this – Lightweight? The R-Pi 2 & 3 have 1GB on them. Lightweight in my mind means that it would run on the original Model A like Wheezy does because of its RAM Limitation (256MB). Hell, a Good GUI should only take up less than 32MB of RAM – Win95 did it back in the day with only 16MB!

As long as it is hardware compatible with all R-Pi Hardware down to the Model A, I will be happy with it. But I would prefer to see the list of the loading process go by, as it does point out to issues in some of the broken R-Pi’s I repair. A shorted out USB Port (that has been crushed) does show up on that list, which makes it easy to diagnose and repair.

If we already installed chrome will it all still work properly?

I want to use my own external WLAN stick. How can I completely disable the WLAN that is build-in, so that it also consumes no energy, but still be able to use my own external WLAN stick?

So you added Infinality patches after FreeType just dropped them because their new upstream improvements are better than Infinality and way more performance efficient?

In Chromium on the page chrome://settings/ I try to log in to Chromium to sync, but I get an error message: “Service unavailable; try again later”. I can log in to other Chromiums on other computers, and I can log in to GMail and YouTube in this Chromium (it’s the same username and password).

I think YouTube works with less lag in Epiphany than in YouTube for HD-videos in full screen on a Raspberry Pi 2 at 1000MHz.

The Epiphany full screen has an irritating white border.

Congratulations on a great looking new desktop environment! But… you named it after my cat, Pixel*, without even asking her! ;)

I might suggest reformatting the version date on the splash screen to ISO 8601 standards (“2016-09”) so it’s equally unambiguous in all regions (besides, there’s another Y4K event coming along in 84 years).

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool CLI person, but I kept getting tempted to install Chromium just to see it on a Pi – now you’ve taken care of that for me… Thanks!

*: (She’s a tabby with one white spot on her nose, her name was quite obvious.)

Hi really great work,

I would like to create new icons pack, is there any way to find sources or folder containing them?

Thanks.

Awesome!! Congratulations on the new updates.

Hi,

I just upgraded as well but i am not seeing the new window design (with the rounded corners) and the new shiny icons. Also on the login screen there is no wallpaper (i have set one on my desktop).

The only reason why i think it could be like this is because i am not logged in as the default pi account (i disabled that) and somehow that is preventing the ui changes?

Would like to have some inside to get the new icon stuff because its great :)

Glad to see video acceleration for the web browser – but why Chromium? Why not Firefox? Yes, please – bring video acceleration to Firefox!

Would anybody care to document the EXACT steps required to update a Pi3B booting from a hard drive using the MSD boot code. Has this been integrated into the new release, or is it due soon (in which case I’ll wait)
Roger

Only one thing today and that is the obvious: IT IS GREAT. What an excellent job, Simon. The word awesome gets overused but not in this case AWESOME

Thank you for your hard work Simon! The wifi/bt on off is such a great feature I’ve been dreaming of, and the extended grab handles have already relieved my usual frustration with the orig ones. SO many new features and I can say I enjoy them all! Glad you did all this!

I like the work you have done looks great. Makes everything look a bit more Mac and a bit less Micro.

As outlined by a lot of other users I also really like the lines of code on the boot screen and miss them already. Please include some splash screen options. On the same line, how come we still cant edit the screen resolution from the config in the menu rather than editing the config file.

So it seems 2016 is the year of the Linux desktop after all!

Will there be a way to switch back to showing a terminal on boot instead of the splash screen? It has always impressed kids that I am teaching and taught a pretty good lesson on how much goes on that they had never seen before. If it’s not currently an option could you consider making it one in the future?

I’m using a B+ model Pi, and for some reason when I tried to install this upgrade, it didn’t quite work all the way… Only some of the icons are different, like the exit, full screen, and minimize buttons… The menu hasn’t changed, and I don’t have that file “usr/share/pixel-desktop” or something like that… What went wrong, and how can I fix it?

Awesome update! I can’t wait to arrive home and update my Pi!! Kudos!!!

Definitely not “Xwindows”! See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

Is there some way to start VNC headless? Up to now I have been installing and starting VNC when connected over ssh and then I can get to the desktop over VNC. With this new arrangement I am in a catch 22 where I need to get to the desktop to start VNC but I can’t get to it until I’ve started VNC. This is on a Pi Zero and I use the feature of putting wpa_supplicant.conf with my wifi details in the boot partition so that I get immediate access to the Pi on first boot without having to plug in a monitor and a USB hub with keyboard and mouse.

Upgrading to PIXEL does not work here. When I enter:

sudo apt-get install -y rpi-chromium-mods

I get the following error:

E: Unable to locate package rpi-chromium-mods

It looks as if a repository is missing. Any idea?

Finally, a browser that doesn’t feel like you are running Netscape on 56k modem circa 1995. Epiphany was truly awful and loathsome and I cursed Rpi every time I launched it. Now, Chromium loads fast and plays videos smoothly, unlike Epiphany which played videos like a slide show.

sudo apt-get install -y rpi-chromium-mods
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to locate package rpi-chromium-mods

What’s going wrong here??

Wondering about plans regarding touchscreen-only accessibility: is Pixel usable with the Raspi touchscreen alone, ie no keyboard/no mouse? So far, only gnome-shell has a decent accessibility with touchscreens, but I’d love a lighter DE!

Nothing like shiny new eye-candy to get the blog revved up and ooohhs and aahhhs from people. I’d like to add my own:
Ooooooohhhhh! Aaaahhhhhhhhh! ;)
Nice work!

As Commandant Lassard from “Police Academy” would say, “This is a very, very, very, very good update!” Chromium and VNC are big pluses – we’ve been installing those ourselves forever, so that’s another time-saver.

Of course, guess who spent about six hours showing newbs how to download, install, and use v1.9.2 of NOOBS at our Makerspace until half-past midnight Tuesday night? Yeahhhhhh … and now we have to do it allllll over again for all of my students – GAHHHHH!!! Oh, well, “Practice makes Purrrrfect”, as Catwoman would say, right? :D

Got v1.9.3 downloaded in all forms here near Jellystone, I mean Yellowstone National Park, and Yogi and Boo-Boo both give it two very furry thumbs up! I’m currently seeding back to the community at over 400 Kbps, so come on over and get your fill while it lasts!

The photography is really stunning – great work on that “small” effort, too! Thanks everyone!

sudo apt-get install -y rpi-chromium-mods
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to locate package rpi-chromium-mods

What’s going wrong here?

Showing the user desktop background on the login screen is a major (potential) privacy issue.

Couple questions:

– Where is the raspbian version info kept in the filesystem ? Many of us run ‘lite’ and don’t install any gui

– Did you implement the ‘copy wpa_supplicant.conf from /boot’ in the lite raspbian ? It’s a great feature that should be in both variants.

I was just about to update mine to this when I realized, all I really want from it is the updated underpower/overtemp icons. In my application the desktop and other things don’t really get used, but I am getting the Rainbow square at the top of the screen and really want to narrow down if it’s over temp or under powered.

Can I get just that portion of the update?

OK… installed and running this new distro… and Chromuim is not letting me sign in with any of my Google accounts so I can sync and transfer all of my bookmarks and such. I try to sign in and I get “Uh-oh!Service unavailable; try again later.”
I’ve tried all the google recommendations to fix this and nothing has worked. This is only happening with this new install… all my other machines are not having this issue. Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this? I really need the sync to work. Thanks.

Just burned a fresh image to a pi 3 , but it appears that wifi and Bluetooth aren’t working.

Second unit upgraded for the day to the new release, first was stock .. second a recently patched Pi3 with the official 7″ touch screen. It runs openbox, conky and is mainly used as a domoticz server. For the first time I saw the under voltage image as explained here

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=82373

Had no issues with it being displayed continuously, but decided to change the 5 volt supply and all is good, no more indicator.

Will give playing youtube on it a spin see how it performs.

Thanks for a good release.

Later Ferdie

Awesome job guys….It looks and real amazing. Many thanks….

After installing as directed, I can start Chromium by clicking Menu | Internet | Chromium Web Browser. But, I haven’t figured out how to make Chromium appear in the Task Bar. I right click the bar, click Panel Settings | Panel Applets | Application Launch Bar, then cannot find Chromium. I’m new to Raspbian/LXDE. Is there a way to add Chromium to the Task Bar?

Hi,
I am not able to run the following commands:
sudo apt-get install -y rpi-chromium-mods
sudo apt-get install -y python-sense-emu python3-sense-emu
sudo apt-get install -y python-sense-emu-doc realvnc-vnc-viewer

Getting the following error:
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to locate package python-sense-emu-doc
E: Unable to locate package realvnc-vnc-viewer

I am running :
Linux raspberrypi 4.1.19-v7+ #858 SMP Tue Mar 15 15:56:00 GMT 2016 armv7l

Can someone please help me with what I am doing incorrectly.

Thanks
Kingshuk.

This is seriously awesome! Great work! Also, adding chromium and youtube playback is huge! Thank you guys!

Nice Upgrade But Big problem with Keyboard Layout loosing setting after each reboot (in GUI).

Hate the Pixel at the moment…. I have a folder called “other” in my Apps menus… When I click to view apps in there(theres about 12) it simple closes then reloads the desktop!!! this will happen EVERY TIME I try to access it and after a while it the stops reloading the desktop which means I have NO taskbar etc and the ONLY way to solve it is to reboot my Pi3!!!!

PIXEL is not unique enough. googling problems will be that much more difficult

Kudos Simon! Looks great, can’t wait to take it for a spin!

odd how NONE of my comments which could show a possible major bug has not been posted!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When I hover over Other in the applications menu the whole top menu bar disappears, and then appears again.

I have upgraded an existing Jessie card.

First impression is, as much as I like the pictures for the background in themselves, I don’t think they really work.

My reasoning is this
– The desktop looses that instant ‘Raspberry’ impact. It was simple and effective branding, the kids loved it and the school children all knew what they where using.

They also then enjoyed setting about trying to alter it, different layout of it. Children like the’Raspberry’ They’re not bothered about pretty pictures, they see them all the time now.

You also loose the ‘branding impact’ of screen shots, it clutters the view for Education, almost overpowering everything else.

Please consider going to a Raspberry backdrop by default and leave the pretty pictures as options for people who want to select something else. If you need to, update the Raspberry. But don’t loose such a good branding tool.

Yes I know it can be changed, but let people who want pictures as backdrops (the children will eventually change it too) select in to them.

That, imho :)
—

I do like the icons on the menu and splash screen, especially as I can customise it a bit. All that text is pointless for a GUI.

Looks great and I will upgrade ASAP ! I also agree with Electra’s comments (and others) about the Boot messages – perhaps a future version could include a ‘hold shift down’ type instruction to quickly switch into the ‘old fashioned’ boot (rather than having to reconfigure and then reboot).

Has anyone managed to get the RealVNC server running under Pixel?
I’ve enabled it in the preferences and rebooted but I cant get the vnc server icon to appear in the taskbar or in the menu.
I can see the viewer, but not the server.

Any ideas?

Hovering over “Other” on the main menu causes the menu to crash and restart. Infinitely repeatable. I’m accessing the desktop via XTightVNC server (Pi3) and viewer (Ubuntu on an AMD64).

And eventually it doesn’t restart and I have to reboot the Pi. God I wish I could avoid the temptation to try new stuff.

Will the new nice-looking icon set be available on e.g. Github, so that it can be used i other installations?
I am impressed with with most aspects of the new desktop version, but expecially the clean icon styling.

I think Raspberry Pi needs to support Ubuntu Snappy Core. Upgrading and installing packages on current raspbian is painfully slow as the medium is sd-cards. The snappy core on the other hands moves away from this whole ‘download and extract’ paradigm.

At the same time, Ubuntu Core does ensure for a very stable system on which we can do things like factory reset etc. Aligning nicely with other modern OSes like Android/iOS.

This outstanding!
Thanks for all of your effort!

https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fraspberry_pi%2Fcomments%2F4fpje5%2Fcrashing_raspberry_pi_3_with_ftp_via_ssh_100%2F&h=QAQGM1mV2&s=1

I have the same problem. update does not fix anything.

After upgrading, the Panel crashes when the mouse hovers over the “Other” menu folder. Not sure why it crashes because of this. Went to the Menu Editor to remove the “Other” menu option to prevent crashes.

OH. MY. GOSH.
The cool android-esque materia design is GREAT!!! this is the OS i’ve been hunting for years….

THANK U RPI!!!!! THANK U EBEN!!! Especially the chromium browser and the sense hat simulator. Now less typing sudo apt-get!!!

Is it possible for you to add on first boot some sort of menu asking us to choose which program or category (programming, office, etc) we want to have installed? I know you want to make Raspbian the all in one all purpose distro but there are people like me who are not interested in programming, gaming or using office applications in Rpi and would like to have a more slim less bloated OS. I know you’ll probably say that I should use Jessee Lite but installing everything from the ground up is not very user friendly plus is very time consuming. Please consider this, give us the tools to customize the distro with minimum effort.

Cheers

Simon, I think you’ve done a fantastic job on Raspbian (Eben made a smart move hiring you). You know what needs to be changed (and refined) to enhance Raspbian UX. Great idea to include a screen-shot (and background history) of where you started your journey.

The desktop photographs are stunning – Greg Annandale’s one talented photographer! They make wonderful desktop backgrounds. (I’ve set background colour to dark grey (less distracting for my working eye). I loved the Raspberry Pi logo as the default desktop background; but it was beginning to get a little stale.

Congrats to Gustav Hansen and team for the Chromium web browser (big improvement). Well done to Sam Alder and Alex Carter for their “iconic” work; its combination with the refined fonts make for a cleaner, more professional UX.

I can understand why geeks are complaining about the removal of boot-up text; but I personally prefer the new splash screen. The addition of a OS version number is a great idea! I agree with others about using ISO standard date format (to reduce international confusion).

The grab handles are much improved and appreciated – fiddly window resizing BEGONE! :-)

You should celebrate this PIXEL milestone for Raspbian and Raspberry Pi. Many don’t realise how difficult it is to balance brand aesthetic with UX transparency. Keep up the good work!

Great work – I like it a lot. One of the most important improvements for me is “Chromium”. I found out that it is possible also to open pdf-Files in it. This is much more comftable than using the old PDF-Viewer.

Thanks for all your efforts!

Sigh.. Killed my ability to boot from USB Hdd…

Chromium is the best part just please find a way on how to sign into chrome so i can use google hangouts!

Tosh, MATE Desktop is only OK on RPi 2B or 3B. It is not light enough for the BCM2835 ARMv6 RPi’s.

If you want MATE start with Lite Image and install from repository.

Actually you will find answer by posting in the Forums, far better than a pathetic rant….

I ran into issues after upgrading, the $HOME/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart was empty which caused a blank screen. Right click and open a terminal window and type “cp /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart $HOME/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart” which will fix the issue.

Just thought I would share in case anyone else has this issue.

Ohhh…very nice work boys and girls. The Pi3 is now a very good desktop computer alternative for general use. Keep up the good work.

After installing Raspbian pixel my Pi3 has extremely slowed down.Help please, anyone.

As others have already mentioned, the early version of Chromium in this update is unable to log in to one’s Google account. Let’s hope this gets fixed real soon. All in all, great work though.

Great update, really glad for the ability to disable wifi!

A few weeks ago I installed xfce On one of my Pis to try it out.

Would changing back to the new desktop be as simple as an `apt-get install lxde`, or do I need to remove some packages?

Thanks!

is possible to move Photon from QNX to raspbery pi?
more developers, more users this is atut for moving photon to open source.

Hi Simon, please could you tell me how to make the scrollbars wider? I have done a lot of googling and tried numerous ideas, with no success so far. Thanks :)

Can you please make a tutorial about how to customize the desktop environment? It will save us a lot of potential trouble learning everything you know!

Absolutely amazing! Great work guys, I’ve been playing with it the whole afternoon.

Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Good on ya, mates!

pixel is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
i love it. simple and functional. lightweight, fast, nice.
appealing gui without unnecessary whistles/bells.
great job, Simon.
thank You very much, sir!

Looks nice. Some of the improvements are quite subtle, but the overall effect is very pleasing.

On my Pi 3 the boot time is now around 17.2 seconds to desktop (previously 13.7 seconds). The shutdown time is now very variable, ranging from around 6 to 92 seconds (previously it was a a consistent 10 seconds). When slow, most of the time it is showing “plymouth-power.off service”.

Hi – I have just upgraded to PIXEL but am having trouble. When I hover over both ‘Office’ and ‘Internet’ the desktop loses top bar and am left with just Wastebasket. Then when I move away from these the full desktop returns. However after trying this a couple of times the desktop sticks on just Wastebasket, and effectively the system doesn’t then respond.
I find that the only way out is to ‘pull the plug’, which I don’t like doing.
Also there is no sign of Chromium in the system, even after I seemed to install it separately after the PIXEL upgrade.
Can someone help?
Thanks

Oh dear, my mouse stopped working and my raid device (/dev/md0) is gone.

Hi Simon
I still had difficulty with it, so as I didn’t have a lot configured on Raspbian, I decided to format the sd card and reinstall Raspbian. All is now OK, thanks.
My problem is I know enough to get into trouble but not enough to get myself out of it ;-))

Hi,

Congratulations on the excellent updates to the Raspbian desktop with this new update.

I have installed Raspbian Jessie with Pixel from the image on a test Pi 3, and all appears perfect.

I have just performed the update process on my main Pi 3, which has been running Raspbian Jessie (May 27th Image). The only issue I appear to have is related to ‘applications whose menu entries do not have an icon associated with them’.

The problem is that occasion the menu bar at the top of the screen disappears then reloads – this isn’t just when accessing sub-menus from the Main Menu itself. I’ve seen this occur when programs are launched, for example clicking a text file in the File Manager; the default text editor loads with the requested file, but whilst it does so this reload of the main menu occurs.

For reference, this Pi 3 contains a wide variety of packages, a custom self-build of ffmpeg, monodevelop, and various updated system configuration files. There was self-compiled version of Chromium present (v 48), however I removed this before upgrading the system.

Following the instructions which were added to the end of the main post on this page, I ran the grep command in each of the suggested directories; each attempt returned no results, although it was clear from the icons in the PcManFM file manager which programs didn’t have an icon associated.

Although I updated all the .desktop files affected, I still had issues when the ‘other’ menu was displayed (however the problems I’d been having when the ‘internet’ menu was displayed were resolved).

I opted to simply remove the ‘other’ folder from the menu entirely using the ‘main menu editor’ tool. This resolved issues when accessing the ‘other’ sub-menu, but not the random reloading of the main menu bar.

I ensured that the package locations where as per the instructions the comments thread, and the all of the update instructions were carried out as specified.

Hi, what do u mean by “To update an existing Jessie image” ? I have the last Raspbian image installed, should i juts type these commands in a terminal in my Pi3 to get the new Pixtel version ?
Regards
Bernard

Great!!
Thanks!
I have an old laptop with lubuntu 16.04 .. and i want also this theme!!
How can i do?!? ;)

I have just install it on my very old but still loved RPi Model B V1 256Mg and it works very well.

Well done everyone that has worked on this project.

Hi. Just installed (fresh from PiBakery) on a Pi3 and it keeps rebooting after splash screen.

Seems impressive. Iconography is on point!

This is an awesome update. Looks very nice. Thank you!

I used Noob Lite to install Rasbian and Pixel on my Pi 3. Noob Lite’s Toolbar WiFi networks button let me log in to the school enterprise network with my username and password to download and install Rasbian with Pixel. How hard would it be to incorporate this feature into Pixel?

This would let individual students log into the Pi 3, then log into the enterprise network using their own account.

Wow Simon!

I installed it last night and got some time to play around today and it’s looking impressive.

Took me just a few minutes to tweak the GUI to my liking and I didn’t need to install anything. You’ve got it all in there and more and looking beautiful too.

Huge Thanks!!!

Hi,

thanks for this great work!

But:

is there a way to change the desktop for other users too? I copied the .config changes form /home/pi to my normal account but I still have the old one :( . By the way, my Pi is headless and I use xrdp for login (and I don’t want to change to ultravnc). The pi account itself works fine.

pixel looks amazing!!

though i seem to have a problem… I can’t seem to communicate with the picamera after the upgrade – any ideas on how to solve this?

(it’s really hard to search for OS/camera problems with on OS named ‘pixel’)

Yup!

Awesome Stuff Simon, just tested it and everything is very good so far

Will FFmpeg be able to use hardware accelerated video with this update?

Hi Simon,

just upgrade my to latest Raspbian and would like to give my (sadly negative) feedback.

Tradition Linux Boot Screen is awesome! I did always hate the modern Linux Distributions try to hide important information with a stupid splash screen. A user with less experience will just ignore it. In case something went wrong or start delayed, its easier to find out whats going on. So my next step is to find out how to disable it.

So lets review Pixel Desktop. Ehhh? Pixel what??
Why this new name? I can’t see any serious big changes that justify the name change. All you did is create a more polished LXDE.

Yes. Nice background images. Who cares? Most peoples like to use her own. I prefer none..

The new Icons are indeed a improvement. I can’t see any other noticeable changes so please call it LXDE in respect for the developers who did the hard work. Another reason why Pixel is a bad name is because it’s not good for google searches.

Now my next question. Why did you not switch to LXQT? LXDE is a dead project, LXQT is superior and they just release a new version. There won’t be any future updates for LXDE.

There are other nice cool stuff, Youtube works finally really well (fullscreen not yet). Wow! But I can’t see this is a part of Desktop Environment.

Things I would love to see didn’t happen. For example I’ve choose german keyboard layout in noobs, but Pixel don’t know about it. That’s not user friendly since it’s not so obviously how to change the keyboard layout with LXDE.

Hope you may read my feedback and consider it for next release.

Kind regards
Werner

I can not find the the menu for install printers in pixel os raspberry. Does someone have a solution?

Congrats! I’m not a lover of GUIs in general and avoid it whenever possible, but anything I read about PIXEL sounds great in every aspect. A lightweight GUI made with the Pi in mind, I’m sure I’ll love it.

When I click the Web Browser icon on the taskbar NetSurf starts up. How do I get it to start up Chrome instead?

Excellent! After upgrading an existing Jessie installation, when I log in via rdp as the “pi” user, I get the new look. When I log in as a different (non-root) user, I get the old look. What’s to do to upgrade existing user accounts to the new look? Thanks!

Thanks a lot for Chromium! Great work!

I run headless, use xrdp. I updated (did not install realvnc-vnc-server) and did not get the new interface with my non-pi user. I did this to solve:

cp -rp /etc/xdg/lxpanel/profile/* ~/.config/lxpanel/
cp -r /etc/xdg/lxsession/* ~/.config/lxsession/

After a few other tweaks to fix things I still do not have the rounded windows feature. How do I fix this for a non-pi user?

I had switched to booting from a USB Drive, after Trying to update 3 times I’m at a loss. After update all looks fine until I try to reboot, at which point it doesn’t boot. is there a solution?

first of all, thanks for great work, but i have problem with access samba via pcmanfm, I still have to enter the password again next time I open PCmanFM or reboot. before this, it work perfectly with raspian jessie image.

i use Image .img with PIXEL desktop based on Debian Jessie, it boot perfectly & logon to desktop, but keep asking password when trying to enter samba network, the is no change with host pc & my others pi pc with old jessie image still work without asking password.

screenshot-
https://s17.postimg.org/6fk0jdln3/2016_09_30_104010_1024x768_scrot.png

Why did you choose a propitiate version of VNC that has a non-free licence, and is incompatible with other free VNC viewers ?

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369545

Hi, the “Sign in to Chromium” option in Chromium does not work. It lets me sign in and then I get the message “Uh-oh! Service unavailable; try again later.”

Sigh, seems to have killed access by VNC and ssh.

Gotta dig out a keyboard and mouse and unplug my HDMI monitor from my desktop machine to troubleshoot.

Should have known better.

Like the option in the GUI to turn off Bluetooth – is there a way for that option to stick on next reboot, or is it meant to just be for current session?

Great update, love chromium, new backrounds and those easy handles when resizing windows, thank you very much!

For some reason I prefer font smoothing/antialiasing to be turned off and looks like the infinality patches broke it. After some investigation why my ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf have no effect I found that user configuration is loaded as /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf, however the infinality is loaded as 52-infinality.conf which overrides user changes (which kind of defeats the purpose of user config). Renaming 50-user.conf to 53-user.conf fixed it for me.

Automatic pnp RTC battery recognition would be a great addition.

WOW, this is great work. Thank you for all your hard work on this. The browsing experience is WAY better for sure. I like the new desktop look. Integration with VNC is awesome as well. Got it all upgraded and working to my benefit without much fuss. Thanks again!

Is there a chance to turn off (disable) the balloon tips like “click here to open the main application menu”?

What if I already have Chromium installed? Will it overwrite or what? Non the less, this update is amazing!

What if I already have Chromium installed on my Pi? Will it overwrite my initial install of Chromium or it wouldn’t?

Why Can’t I Install Vim?

I dare to disagree about the fact that this theme is much better than the previous one. Let me explain… First of all, IMHO the icons look more like comics than a professional icon set. But actually one of my main concerns has always been the fact that Raspbian insists on using full hinting for fonts (a thing that should be made illegal… just kidding). :D

Full hinting is extremely tiring for the eyes. I understand that many people are not ready for turning off hinting (I did it recently on a PC, it takes a while to get used to) but here’s why slight hinting is the way to go. See for instance how Ubuntu does things.

The Shiki Colors theme and icons, together with a wallpaper found online (and slight hinting) allow for a (IMHO) better look:

https://imgur.com/a/7t8rX

Of course I understand that everyone might have a different taste when it comes to interfaces and in no way I want to bash your work. I would just like to express my disagreement. :)

Hello.
Pixel Tested on Rpi model A 256MB ram.
It is faster !
Good Job :D
There`s no direct option to connect to peap-encrypted wifi.
Youtube on realtek 8188CUS wifi is unplayable.(Maybe because is connected without powered hub)
Will try on usb-ethernet adapter – should be better.
New browser is unusable… Use epiphany instead

Hi,

Great theme Simon! Thanks for it.

Could you (or anyone else) share the theme, so that it can be used on other distributions? Or if you could indicate which deb file contains all the theme files (content of /usr/share/temes/pix, I believe)
I’ve already managed to recover the icons from my retropie install, but I can’t seem to be able to get the theme without installing a lot of unneeded dependencies.

Thanks in advance.

My desktop icons and file manager folder icons are huge how can I make them normal size like in the photos above

Anybody else have the problem that the Office menu doesn’t work? Unless this is an easily fixable bug I guess I will need to rebuild everything from the last version.

Before the update ::
– everything was running fine, fast and without any problems

After the update ::
– chromium browser is not opening anymore
– embedded browser is not opening
– no log file at all
– wlan is very slow

Some suggestions what and where to check the error messages or how to disable / revert this upgrade?

So far I’ve been unable to connect via Remote Desktop from my Win 10 to my Pi 3 running Pixel. I’ve never had this trouble before.

Super lovely update, looks and feels really nice

I am running into to issues, one being that no matter what browers i use, i cant get audio from youtube and the like. The jack is tested and works fine, and i can get audio from different sites, just not youtube…

Second, i have a issue with the resolution when going headless. As always i log ind via TightVNC but now the resolution is crazy low – sorry if this has been up already, i just really have no clue how to fix this :)

Apart from that its such a nice looking desktop

Cheers

I’m probably going to sound like an idiot but I’m on jessie, I ran the commands rebooted and nothing. It looks the same. Am I missing something here.

I did make a comment on this matter on the Raspbian section of the Forums but there has been no reply so I shall have to repeat it. Before I downloaded the Pixel Desktop, my Raspberry Pi 3 (but not my Raspberry Pi 2) would pick up the titles set by #EXTINF:-1, in #EXTM3U playlists for video and radio station URLs. This no longer happens and all I see on screen are the URLs which are often shortened so much as to[be meaningless. Is there any way that I[can get this useful way of titling URLs?

Certainly boots quicker (I didn’t expect that) and the new background images make it look a lot better too.
Only from a Newby viewpoint I am disappointed that I can’t connect straight away to the internet in Chromium with an out-of-box install (update actually from NOOBS Raspbian) on a Model 3.
Even after editing /etc/network/interfaces to include dhcp and a gateway address it still doesn’t connect, either with wired or wireless interfaces.
That’s about the limit of my Linux knowledge and I am sure there will be others on here that don’t even have that.
There doesn’t seem to be any easy way to configure networking in the GUI – or have I missed something?

Friends why do you not take the whisker menu’s code and port it to LXDE to bring an even better modern UI? you could ALSO add a window decoration with the colors of the panel wich matches and fits it to look like an uniform window?

Thanks Simon. I missed the Rt-click option – didn’t think of that!
However I think my build must be corrupted because even after explicitly setting IP, G/W, DNS etc the browser can still only access stuff on the LAN. Nothing on the internet works ERR_NAME_RESOLUTION_FAILED

I’ll try a full download of PIXEL later.

Update on last issue…
The full download of PIXEL worked fine with Chromium. My earlier one was obviously corrupted to some extent although strangely when left running for a few hours whilst I was out it also suddenly started working!
Only issue I now have is a can’t get any sound out of it – using any app or youtube videos… Ho, Hum!

I’m getting repeated errors on mysql-server, attempting to upgrade my Jessie installation on a RPi A.

I’ve tried uninstalling mysql and purging everything associated with it. Then when I try to install it again I get the same errors as seen below.

Calculating upgrade… Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
2 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Setting up mysql-server-5.5 (5.5.52-0+deb8u1) …
Job for mysql.service failed. See ‘systemctl status mysql.service’ and ‘journalctl -xn’ for details.
invoke-rc.d: initscript mysql, action “start” failed.
dpkg: error processing package mysql-server-5.5 (–configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mysql-server:
mysql-server depends on mysql-server-5.5; however:
Package mysql-server-5.5 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package mysql-server (–configure):
dependency problems – leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
mysql-server-5.5
mysql-server
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
root@raspberrypiA:/home/pi# systemctl status mysql.service
● mysql.service – LSB: Start and stop the mysql database server daemon
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/mysql)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2016-10-06 02:25:19 BST; 25s ago
Process: 7612 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/mysql start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Oct 06 02:25:19 raspberrypiA /etc/init.d/mysql[8332]: 0 processes alive and ‘/usr/bin/mysqladmin –defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping’ resulted in
Oct 06 02:25:19 raspberrypiA mysql[7612]: Starting MySQL database server: mysqld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . failed!
Oct 06 02:25:19 raspberrypiA systemd[1]: mysql.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
Oct 06 02:25:19 raspberrypiA systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Start and stop the mysql database server daemon.
Oct 06 02:25:19 raspberrypiA systemd[1]: Unit mysql.service entered failed state.

Not sure if it’s related to the in-place dist-upgrade, but MQTT no longer automatically starts (via init.d). I can run it into daemon mode manually on the command line but it used to be there running after booting before the upgrade. I’m running it on a Pi2.

Such great work on the new desktop and accompanying tweaks! I’ve been tempted back in to the Raspbian fold (from Ubuntu Mate). The design is clean and modern, but still blisteringly fast (especially on a Pi3).

The functionality is so good too, especially the Bluetooth integration. Nice to see Chromium back too.

Great work!

Does this dist-upgrade overwrite the kernel?

I use a version of Raspbian Jessie named CompassLinux that has some kernel fixes and a driver for the NW Digital Radio UDRC / UDRC II

If the Pixel update replaces the kernel, this is a problem.

I would just like to know how your are pulling up that image? In the past it was with fbi, is this still the way it’s being used. I for one like the splash screen and the ability to customize your system but yet still hide it in times of issues.

Hey does anybody knows how to get faster videos like said on this page with firefox instead of chromium?

Hi,

Been playing with the Chromium browser on PIXEL and found that the video playback kinda stutters every 1-2 secs. Anybody else getting the same problem?

Cheers,
Fadzly

Hi Simon,

Excellent work with this release. Hats off to you.

H/W accelerated Chromium installed by default was by far the best addition for me.

Just have a small question. I use the RPi to auto launch Chromium on kiosk mode. I get it working by adding a line to the LXDE or LXDE-pi autorun config file.

This doesn’t work with the PIXEL. How can I auto run scripts after the desktop has booted?

Thanks!

Regards,
Thiruselvam

Does Chromium allow the use of WebGL?

3D CAD software like TinkerCad and Onshape require this. It would be incredible to be able to use a Pi for CAD!

Simon, I absolutely LOVE the new grab handles.

You have fixed my single biggest gripe with the old interface.

Thanks! It is like a whole new PC.

I love the new PIXEL desktop backgrounds you’ve provided. Please consider, in a future update, allowing for the following:

1) The RPi chooses a random image from the folder on each reboot

OR

2) The RPi user can change the desktop image based on a calendar setting

Hi all.
Loving PIXEL so far. I’ve put together a script with all the commands for the update process to be as hassle-free as possible (you’ll still need to press ‘q’ at the plymouth screen). Please let me know about what you think of it.
Thanks,
UnRipePi

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7RxLUh-8unIUDN4Tm5Zd2lzNXM

Can anyone provide a link to the source used for the Chromium implementation? Not sure what to apply the patch file to.

I put PIXEL on my PI2 today, simply because I try and keep it fully up to date. However, I only did the first two steps. Here are my observations:
1) insufficient detail about what I am installing and why for the chromium and python steps.
2) it’s quite a lot slower to start up, albeit a little prettier by having a picture for the desktop.
3) For my use, it’s not necessary; I use my Pi only for one thing: learning Mathematica and using it for numeric computations beyond Visual Studio’s BigIntegers. For my need, function is ALL that matters, not appearance.

I hope no one gets angry about my comments, just remember that my needs are specific. I’ve been doing personal computer design, programming and IT support since the days of the original IBM PC and 128k Apple Mac. If you are happy with PIXEL, or think it’s necessary I have no beef with you. I just hope that it doesn’t slow my work down as used to happen in the early days of many Windows versions. Back in those days, the easiest way to speed up someone’s PC was to remove the desktop picture.

I would still like to see support for a hidden SSID for Wi-Fi.

Hoping for some help.

I installed PIXEL using:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The greeter window seems broken.
When I type in the correct password, It tries to login but just flashes the screen and returns back to the login prompt.

I’ve verified my password is being typed in correctly. And it is not returning a “invalid password” message. (to be sure I have purposely attempted an incorrect password and in that case it DOES return an “invalid password” message)

I am able to SSH in, but not sure how to fix this.

Any help?

I’m not sure how this happened, but I’ll post in case someone else runs into it.

My taskbar was completely missing after and upgrade/dist-upgrade. I finally found that the ~/lxpanel folder was completely missing for some reason. I copied it over from one of my other pis that updated ok and now my taskbar is fine.

Love the fix for the 32-bit color depth! (although I had screen issues–black screen and screen split into four quadrants– until I updated my screen refresh scripts to use the correct bitdepth)
fbset -depth 8 && fbset -depth 32 && xrefresh -root -d :0.0

Doesn’t xrdp allow a smoother desktop experience than RealVNC?
So if you remote access from a windows machine, use xrdp.

Hi,

i like the new Pixel did a fresh install on one of my pi zero’s last night but the WIFI (via Dongle) seems to have problems could u give me a hint how to fix that?

with kind regards,

Martin (the Netherlands)

While pixel is pretty, it seems to have killed bluetooth on my PI 3. Any advice on getting it back?

I have a set of pi 3s for students in midle school. The new OS install looks great and worked well for nearly all except one pi3 which seemed to update but now does not show the top menu bar only the trash and desktop icons, but on right click another desktop or terminal window is visibile.
Not sure what I can do but restart and repeated update and dist-upgrade do not change it. Can this be modified using raspi-config?
Thanks for the help.

Just installed Chromium on my Pi3. It loads very quickly and uses less RAM than Firefox. Good one! Does this version share your browsing data with Google like the Windows version does?

Hard to set up the proper resolution (1920×1080). Can’t do this! Tried several times but failed :(

are considering a decent unrar desktop app to add there ?thanks

I just installed PIXEL and did the update mentioned above first things. Chromium seemed to be working fine during this. Then I logged my chromium account and installed chrome remote desktop. Now my chromium crashed within 10 seconds every time I open it.

Did I do something wrong, or is there another bug here?

Pixel was covered in the Linux Unplugged talk show including contributions from Wimpy who is the lead developer on Ubuntu MATE (a very popular alternative distribution for the Raspberry Pi) who plans to try and add the Chromium optimisations to MATE as well…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijr7sUgtse8&feature=youtu.be&t=741

Well, i have a problem, but it caused not by update. I was playing with aptitude night before, removing some useless pagages, and after reboot i got a problem with desktop environment. Generally, my system boots into desktop gui, requiring login; and this gui aivails to choose between “default xsession” or “lxde” or “openbox”. I always use a “default xsesion” mode, but today it shows only white screen and mouse coursoir, if right-clicking, it shows openbox menu. It seems like loading to openbox environment. If I loading to lxde, it shows ugly lxde environment as it looks just out of box on fresh debian systems (i.e. desktop-oriented x86 debian, not raspbian). It is strange, because previous “default xsession” was an tuned lxde (i.e panels, menus, widgets, preffered aps, window-manager, file brousers, etc…), and its configs (with all stuff like panels, etc) still exists, but not handling. I was trying to update and instal additional packages to get PIXEL theme, but, despite these was installed sucessfully, “default xsession” still could not hadle it. What should I do to get back my candy windows and panels stuff?

P.S. This post was sent by links2 brouser, runnued in terminal. Maybee, I can survive without x system at all?

P.P.S. Anybody knows a nice CLI offline dictionary? I have a goldendict, but it is x-depends and don’t running at all in terminal. Also, is there a russian-speaking people? I need, also, a free dictionary (i.e. database with words), but in the Raspbian repos i found only one small (about 1000 words) eng-rus dictionary (dependig from goldendict package), and, I need a rus-eng dictionary (backwars translation) too. There I can find and load it?

P.P.P.S. Isn’t it be a prettiest, if the repository have has a meta-package (or virtual package) for PIXEL theme?

Up to 39 secs to boot following this morning’s update to lightdm, pi-greeter etc.

What torrent client do you use on this new OS?

Fantastic job! Thanks.

Looks nice!

When I Log out after startx, My raspberry pi won’t accept the password and keeps returning to the login screen.

I appreciate the new look but we’re still suffering from the lack of touch UI support!

Pixel rocks!

Now I want it for my AMD64 Ubuntu as well. Any chance of you guys porting/cross-compiling it to Ubuntu for AMD64 and x86?

Ubuntu’s default window manager is sad and most other are bloated beyond belief. Pixel is so cute and so light that I love it :-)

A semi-bug with PIXEL is that the mouse has to be almost halfway into an application’s task bar icon before clicking the icon has any effect. E.g. https://www.dropbox.com/s/f32yn3lm1rd97k3/PIXEL%20taskbar%20icons.png?dl=0

Lovely work, many thanks….one slight issue that I seem to have hit after upgrading is that the speaker icon is now greyed out with a red cross over it and although .mp3’s play, I don’t seem to get any other audio. I’ve tried playing with the raspi.config audio settings, however it give the error message ‘There was an error running option A9 Audio”. I’ve also tried Audio device settings in preferences and get the message “No Alsa audio devices detected, enable internal device”. I’m out of ideas for the moment! Many thanks again for a lovely piece of work.

I did the dist upgrade and the extra apt-get parts but it looks like I still have the old window manager. How can I tell what I have and why didn’t it upgrade? I had to find Chromium and add it to the menu system manually.

In the Desktop Session Settings it states that the Window Manager is openbox-lxde

Congratulations! Great work..
Everything is working fine but I can´t use pyserial in pixel.
Also cannot find /etc/inittab

can you please guide me?

My Raspberry Pi actually crashed After attempting this upgrade. Right after the reboot it would just freeze on the desktop screen. Couldn’t use the keyboard or mouse. Visually on the desktop the wireless icon was deactivated along with the sound, couldn’t do a thing.

Hi,

just bought first PI 3, I love it :). But just get one problem. I was able to install through wifi the PIXEL, not sure that was a good idea, mean to use WiFi instead of LAN. But after successfully installation, wifi does not working any more, only LAN. Wifi icon missing from PanelApplets. I tried many thinks, updating/upgrading, ifdown & ifup wlan0, wpa_gui not found. Is something that can be made? Thank you for any help

When using add/remove software in Pixel, it seems to insist on using the Pi user account, which group do I need to add my personal account to for it to appear in the Auth list? I usually disable the Pi Account.

Any idea what would make the shutdown hang for ages at “[ OK ] Stopped Target network is Online”?

when Im using dist-upgrade, I have to confirm the “adobe flash player info”. Is it possible to auto confirm it? -y doesnt help in this case.
I need it badly (for my unattended rpi installation/configuration via ansible)

This is way too high-tech!
Much better than older releases

pixel first setup page，why not support chinese language？

every thing was fine, but when i install PIXEL it ask me for the password, but cause the start was automatic, i forgot it. I found some articles that changing file cmdline in the SD, by adding init=/bin/sh at the end it permit to go to the etc directory where i must edit the file shadow in order to eliminate the root password. but this file is read only. command chmode is unrecognized and nano also. somo one can show me how to solve my problem?
thanks a lot.

I have just installed it on a Pi2. The Chromium browse is nice but one site I go to does not render correctly Chromium on Windows renders it fine. The site is http://www.dyalog.com. This is the company that offer the APL language interpreter for free for the RaspberryPI so it is a bit of a pity that the site does not display correctly on the new browser.

Nice Themes in Pixel…how to use this on non-Pi’s with LXDE desktop?

How do I get an iChrome-extension to work with auto-start?

Is it possible to set an animated GIF as the splash screen. I just wondered so i could add an OS X load screen since i modded it to look like a mac.

easy install and looks fantastic but I’m having problems with my wireless adapter (rtl8191su) it stopped working and gives me “no wireless interfaces found” when I click on the internet connection icon in the upper right hand corner. it does show when I enter lsusb in the terminal. would really appeciate if someone could point me in the right direction to get this fixed. Thank you

It’s sad to install this OS and find that if I sudo apt-get update I get these errors! E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with Mergelist /var/lib/dpkg/status (By the way I have cleaned this file didn’t fix it.)
E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

As for ALSA I have never had so many problem connecting a USB mic or Bluetooth speaker. Both work great, but not in Pixel. Linux user for 16 years.

@olajideolawale : i am have issues with the rtc clock, i have changed my cmos battery still i cant set the real time clock on my raspberry pi 2. need help !!!!!!!!

Updated my Pi 2 with the 7″ official touchscreen….no mouse or keyboard attached.

Boots fine, but the screen stays blank! This is a problem, since the machine is my home thermostat! Ugh. Should have known better.

I’ve tried copying some of the lxsession files into my local .confix/lxsession/LXDE-pi folder but nothing I’ve done has brought the touch screen display back online.

Thermostat code seems to be running fine (started from LXDE-pi/autostart)…..so heat will work.

Any ideas why the update blanked my screen or what to try to get it to display? Could it be the missing mouse/keybd? If so, how do I get around that?

Sure could use some help on this….

Thanks!

Is this alpha software?? I had a raspberry pi b1 with a usb wifi adapter set up as an MPD server with headless access and a DNLA player. I downloaded PIXEL and absolutely nothing works. Wifi doesn’t work. VNC doesn’t work. Ethernet connects and then disconnects immediately. Chromium takes half an hour to display because it takes forever to load the ad blocker. All I have is a non-functional pretty screen. Fix everything, please.

After updating tp pixel my taskbar doesn’t load (just an empty white bar) – cant be clicked or right-clicked.
After about 3 mins it suddenly appears.

OMG ! OMG ! OMG ! I changed my Pi3 from Jessie to Pixel. I had problems getting Jessie to connect outside of my local net. So I did the update. WOW ! and WOW ! The Pi now is less intimidating to the newbie ! There is OpenElec for the media streamer, NOOBS to play around with and get the feel of the many distros out there and now Pixel to give it the feel of a full fledge PC ! The nice thing is that once a user gets comfortable they can change it on the fly much easier than a Windows machine. Great work on giving us this amazing new interface. I now can control BT and Networking without the hassles. The look is sharp and amazing. It just works better !!!!

I like running kodi on my pi 3. Know about osmc and openelec but it’s nice to move from kodi to other apps without rebooting or changing microsd cards. kodi does still work, but only after changing memory split to 256 assigned to gpu. So I guess pixel must be using significantly more memory? Am I wrong or are there other fixes? Also previous fixes e.g. Jeroen’s script on ‘aperezm-vlex/kodi.sh’ on GitHub, no longer works in fixing the blank screen issue when leaving kodi. In fact it now leaves a screwed up pixelated mess – excuse the word play… Anybody have a solution for this?

Hi,
what is the best way to install the pixel desktop on a fresh Raspbian Minimal installation? I need a desktop environment but want to avoid all the overhead that comes with the full 4GB image.

The Main menu isn’t working still even after I input the debug code that was given. Help?

Hallo,
I upgraded my pi to pixel. I have a raspberry pi2 with raspbian jessie as OS.
But my menu bar/ task bar got lost.
I did the update and the dist-upgrade because of possible bug fixes. but I didn’t got my menu/ taskbar back.
What can I do?

The biggest improvement inside Pixel is the well working Chromium browser with even Flash available. This point is under advertised. Youtubes run well with sound in sync for resolutions of 720p and below.

(Late)Idea for a Raspberry Pi 3 C:
create a model for primary schools/homes – remove the GPIO and camera pins (+blue tooth maybe even WiFi) to make physical and financial space for some eMMC memory carrying Pixel in 8GB or 4 GB trimmed down. Will be a best seller!

Today’s ui update has made the boot-up faster on my Pi3

The new Pixel desktop UI looks awesome and works like a charm. Thank you developers for all the effort.

One feature I would really like to have is window snapping/tiling. I did some searching around but couldn’t find anything to install it on the pixel environment. I would really appreciate if this feature would be implemented in the near future.

excellent
\Thanks

Richard

Chromium keeps crashing. I uninstalled and reinstalled same thing. I have a feeling it is because of some of the chrome extensions installed. Unfortunately it crashes before i can disconnect from my account

I really like the Pixel theme you created here. Is there a way to install it on Debian Jessie on a PC ? Thanks !

Having trouble with chromium sign in, have done apt-get update apt-get upgrade & apt-get dist-upgrade and rebooted. The only real difference is my chromium version is 51.0.2704.106.

The upgrade from september to november is so big, I would suggest to refresh the Raspbian image distributed…

Awesome :D

Does anyone know how the PIXEL audio system works? I made a SE question here: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/58193/how-do-i-enable-usb-audio-for-gui-applications-on-raspbian-alsa-command-line-i

I cannot find Pixel at Downloads section.
How could I get it?

LXDE is in great condition and his further development continues:
https://git.lxde.org/gitweb/ [Gtk+ components]
GTK 2+ is still maintained – version gtk+ 2.24.31 is from 9 Sep 2016.
There is some progres of LXDE with GTK 3+.
Here is the Arch Linux packages:
https://www.archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/lxde-gtk3/

One question: where is the ‘PIXEL Desktop Environment’ packages for download.
I like to test this environment on Arch or Ubuntu/OpenSUSE.

I have 2 RbPi’s one with PIXEL and the other one with the older raspbian. I run CodeBlocks on both with the same source. On the old one I get a compile in 15 seconds and on the new one 20 seconds. That is 33% slower. Both are RBPi 2b’s. The startup is also slower, although I didn’t measure it.
I don’t think PIXEL is an improvement, it reminds me of Vista compared to XP.
:-(

After rebooting when i installed the upgrade, i get only a black screen and the green light flashes 4 times. Does anyone know what the problem is?

The November update will not ever boot or let me ssh into too. The pixel is not working

I’m a relatively infrequent Raspian user and get a bit overwhelmed by the vast array of config files and startup scripts. I’ve upgraded my RPi to PIXEL and worked around a couple of minor problems.

One thing I’d really like to do is to bring up a Real VNC server on a port other than 5900. I’ve been using 5902 with tightvnc without an issue, but, after rooting around for a couple of days, I haven’t been able to get Real VNC, running the PIXEL desktop, to show up anywhere other than port 5900, as a reflection of the original PIXEL window.

Can someone point me in the right direction to bring up a second PIXEL window, on a second Real VNC port?

Thanks!

Finally I made it worked, now I cannot expand the file system for the card. I tried a couple of time to expand the card. But it is not working.

I’m having trouble with the update.

Ver 2B (also failed in a Rasp Pi Zero) + 16g microSD card.

I downloaded and installed the image as instructed. That worked. Booted successfully.

Opened terminal window & ran

“sudo apt-get update”

and that worked w/o errors.

But when I then entered
“sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”

It ran (and ran, and ran) and then gave 4 or 5 lines of error saying it had run out of space.

At that point I tried to reboot. The reboot ‘crashed’ (to a blank screen) just after the PIXEL splashscreen occurred (after 5 or 6 pairs of lines of “this is what happened) flashed by underneath the splash screen.

I’ll try re-installing, but the question I have is “Is a 16gig card too small?”

Love the new update.

Chromium? Awesome! However, I discovered the Chromium pre-installed with Raspbian is version 51. The current version of Chromium is 55, and it isn’t in the Raspbian Repositories. I don’t know any ways to install 55, but I do know how to install 53 onto a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3. Check out my handy installer for Chromium 53 for ARM: coolchasgamer.wordpress.com/chromium-arm.

PS: You guys are so awesome :)

UPDATE: Chromium ARM now at version 55. I recommend using the updated installer now. Leave feedback at coolchasgamer.wordpress.com/chromium-arm. Thanks :D :)

Where are the sources please ?

Is it possible to install Pixel on top of a per-existing image?
Meaning, is pixel just a Windows Manager? If so, where can I install it from?
Instead of using a pre-made img of Pixel.
I am currently using a pre-made Debian image with XFCE

Thanks

Sorry for the hand holding. I think a lot of folks would like to know the same things.

Specifically which file and how to install Pixel Desktop on a preexisting system?

Thanks so much for your time

Specifically this distro/build and using a 3.5 LCD.

The desire to do this is because XFCE is TERRIBLE with a small LCD screen. The app windows are not standardized and OFTEN go beyond the screen of selecting things.

Hi Simon,

I think it would be nice to have a small article (at least stub for now) about PIXEL on Wikipedia. Currently I was unable to find one. I tried to find info here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_(disambiguation) .

BR,
Victor Yarema

So if I understand this correctly (I’ve never used Raspberry PI before/have no previous knowledge of it) this is not a stand-alone OS that can be installed alone….correct??

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair, although I can’t remember the model. BASIC was my go to language for many years. That little computer was awesome! Learned so much from it.

Thanks for Pixel. I can’t wait to try it out on an old Dell desktop that I have just sitting around collecting dust.

Is there anyway to install Pixel as a permanent image on a hard drive instead of on a USB drive?

Failed to load ldlinux.c32

This is on USB flash memory stick on Dell Latitude D530 with 2GB RAM.

Good morning all,

I installed PIXEL on an old ASUS Eee PC 900. It works fine, but just like a lot of other people I dearly missed the raspi-config functionality, especially to determine how I wanted to reboot. So, happing into the raspi-config code, I wrote my own raspi-boot script. If you are interested you can find it here:

https://github.com/GerardWassink/PIXEL-boot.git

it offers a script called raspi-reboot. Check it out.

Overall, quite nice, but how does one turn off the rounded corners of windows? They tend to cut off content. Thanks.

This is fantastic!

I have switched over but I am having trouble getting screen locking to work. I usually have my pi autologin and then screen lock after idle time. It’s important for security. (one small practice of many) I have installed xscreensaver and I can lock the screen manually, but it will not lock even after the screensaver has been on for some time.

Otherwise fantastic, I’ll keep my eyes out for updates that might fix this very minor problem.

Lock problem is a problem, but not your problem.
If I set the lock timeout SHORTER than the blank timeout, it locks just fine.
If I set the blank timeout shorter than the lock timeout, it will go to screensaver, but never lock.
It used to lock in the past, after the screensaver was already running for a while, but now it does not.
That which worked before Pixel, and does not work any more after Pixel, is not necessarily Pixel’s fault.
Anyway, I can make it work and it’s probably JWZ’s problem, or the raspbian package maintainer.

Thank you!
=mortimer

Just upgraded a Jessie Distro RPi 2 (Linux 4.4.34-v7+) with the PIXEL layout and it broke after the third reboot. First reboot, I attempted to execute the command “sudo apt-get update” but the terminal never showed the output, and I could open other programs, but it was super sluggish and the CPU fluctuated between 40% and 99% usage. On the second reboot, the same thing happened, but when I attempted to shutdown, the background just displayed and it never finished the shutdown process. When I attempted to boot the RPi after this incident, I could see the new PIXEL splashscreen then a small cursor blinking in the upper left hand corner. It never goes beyond that. Thank the Universe I had a backup image, or else I’d be soooooo pissed….

This is just an FYI for those of you who have these little RPis in more sensitive situations, it is still in a very early stage!

I had no problem installing it on an old 4GB usb drive using my Linux Mint desktop. Everything worked good including Chromium. Problem is after reverting back to my desktop Chromium has become wonky. Nothing happens after signing in to Chromium … now the browser will only work in the incognito window. Weird!

Does the update keep all our files and the programs we installed? (don’t want to go through re-installing the numerous programs I had)

When will we get HDD install-able media?

It is nice a a live system but I would like to be able to install to hard-drive…

Also… LXQt would be nice… in the future, when you get the time to implement it.

Now… one thing I have read that I do think should be address soon is the miss-mash of flat and non-flat design… though, beat me which one is best though. I just agree the miss-mash is somewhat off.

Asides from that… I would like install-able media.

Just upgraded from 4.4.34-v7+ to 4.4.38-v7+ and found 2 issues so far,
1) My desktop wallpaper gone back using the default “road.jpg”.
2) I had different wallpaper set for each desktops before and now they all default to the same wallpaper and I cannot find the selection to uncheck “Use the same wallpaper on all desktops”. Matter of facts, When I launch either “Desktop Preferences” or “Appearance Settings”, the “Appearance Settings” dialog box appears.
Anyone have idea on how I can fix this?

Hi Simon,
I have posted a problem in the forum describing the Chromium browser opening an url crashes the system completely.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=169921
Can you please look into it also. Thanks

Seem to have a problem that after initially running the pixel for first time from install that when paid in and power up it then does not output to the vga monitor. I re imaged the sd card again and it booted up on vga monitor again fine however when I shutdown and then started up again power was going through pi but nothing on the screen ( would seem it not got signal to turn monitor on) running raspberry pi 2 model b with hdmi to vga converter. With latest rasbian jesse for pi.

So I recently bought the RPi3 and I have noticed that with the same power cord and supply I have been using for my RPi2 B+ it has been showing the power supply lightning bolt in the top right corner. It usually does this when im running a program or opening one and/or it will turn on and off every so often when a program has been up. I am not sure why this would be happening on this version of Pi. Nothing has changed except the update to this Distro(Pixel), which I still use on the RPi2. I use and always have been a standard Logitech keyboard and a wireless mouse, this setup hasn’t caused me problems with the RPi2 B+.

I don’t like the new GUI. Is there a way to remove PIXEL?

Hi,
I’m new in the PI universe and also I don’t know very much Linux and configuration of the OS.

I want to run some videos (.avi, .vmw) using the Mplayer (can’t change to another player) but the videos are playing slowly/jerky. Do you know, any of you guys, what I have to do to fix this?
Are there some codecs that needs to be installed or other configurations?

Thank you.

Hi,

What ever happened to Maynard?

https://github.com/raspberrypi/maynard/wiki

Why a new desktop environment?
Existing desktops are too heavy for a Raspberry Pi (KDE and Gnome) or they don’t work on Wayland (LXDE).