As the official operating system of the Raspberry Pi single board computer, the Raspberry Pi operating system has been updated for Debian 11 “Bullseye”. The Raspberry Pi OS has moved its package base from Debian 10 to Debian 11, as Bullseye has been stable and in good shape over the past few months.

In addition to upgrading the underlying packages for new Debian releases, Raspberry Pi OS has completed the migration of its own desktop components from GTK2 to GTK3. The Raspberry Pi desktop should now also be in good shape and run smoothly on GTK3. GNOME’s Mutter has also replaced Openbox as the window manager used on the Raspberry Pi OS.

The Raspberry Pi OS doesn’t yet use Wayland by default, but with the transition to GTK3 and Mutter they are moving in that direction, but there is still more work to do before the transition.

This big update to the Raspberry Pi OS will also default to using the Broadcom KMS kernel driver instead of their previous proprietary driver, a new camera driver that uses libcamera’s RPi camera Module, and more. Those with a Raspberry Pi 4 Rev 6 (8GB models and more recently 2GB/4GB models) will also see boost mode clocked up from 1.5GHz to 1.8GHz for better performance.