The distro formerly known as Raspbian has received some modest tweaks – and a whole new kernel version.
Raspberry Pi Ltd is a little capricious when it comes to version numbering for Raspberry Pi OS, and although this release contains a fairly significant change, it doesn't seem to have a different version number. While PiOS is based on Debian 13 "Trixie," the company significantly customizes upstream Debian, including newer kernels.
For 13 years now, Raspberry Pi has been adding new sections to the top of a single release notes file, which tells us that this build is dated 2026-06-18 and updates the kernel from version 6.12.75 to version 6.18.34. Even so, the version number on the splash screen is strangely unchanged. It remains at 6.2, which was the modest security update announced in April. Now there's a much bigger change – but no announcement and no new version number. So much for version numbers having meaning.
[...] So what is new in the latest version of PiOS? Well, the kernel is now version 6.18 from November, which became the LTS kernel within days. By default, PiOS 6 uses the labcw Wayland compositor with some components drawn from LXDE, such as the panel and file manager.
This is in place of its old customized version of LXDE, formerly called PIXEL. This release includes labwc version 0.9.7, replacing version 0.9.2. You can still switch back to Openbox for an X11 desktop if you want, but this disables the Wayland-based Raspberry Pi Connect that was added a couple of years ago (and might yet make it over to Windows).
[...] We upgraded a testbed Pi 5 from the January release, and it went smoothly with no apparent difference – and it still only takes about 560 MB of RAM under X11, which is very good for 2026. The new kernel means that some functions are slightly slower and some slightly faster, but you probably won't be able to tell. For the full lowdown, Linux news site Phoronix has extensive benchmarks.
[...] The new Wayland-based PiOS desktop environment is one of our favorites: it's simple, clean, and fast. Back in 2022, we said it was the best way to revive an old PC. The sad thing is that it still is. It takes as little memory as, say, BunsenLabs Carbon or Crunchbang++, but it's a much more familiar desktop layout and easier to use.
[...] There are lots of lightweight Linux distros out there. We still recommend Alpine Linux, but it needs some skill to install, especially if you want to dual-boot – it's harder than Arch Linux. Adélie Linux looks very promising but it's still in beta (there hasn't been a new release since we looked at it in late 2024). There are many others, but they're all rather specialist tools that need some Linux skills. The PiOS Desktop was by far the easiest.
The Linux world badly needs more lightweight distros that are ruthlessly easy to install – as the Raspberry Pi Desktop was. They need to offer a simple, quick, clean, Windows-like desktop – not something different for its own sake, like GNOME, or cluttered with myriad needless options like KDE Plasma. Something that will work happily on a 15-year-old PC with 3 GB of DDR2 RAM and a spinning disk – the sort of PC that still works fine, but would cost more to upgrade than the price of a Raspberry Pi 5. A distro that works happily on X11 would be a win, too, for old and unsupported GPUs.
The Raspberry Pi Desktop once fit that bill very well. The PC world could really benefit from a freshened-up version. If Mike Thompson and Peter Green from the original project are still around, they might even help.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 05, @07:37PM
Made me nutso... in the old days a major kernel change wouldn't happen on a "maintenance version" but, I believe starting with 14.04 - which was the version I was tasked with fixing a pile of NVIDIA oriented OpenGL code to work on embedded Intel graphics... they started pushing major kernel changes with the 14.04.dot updates, major changes in the kernel that broke stuff that, for instance, did work in 14.04.1 but then didn't work in 14.04.2 or 14.04.3... Eventually, part of my patch involved patching the kernel to nail down the important parts to work with our code and hardware, but it was super annoying the day I found out they had been shifting the kernel under my feet when older releases didn't used to do that.
Here, 12 years later, I guess RasperryPi OS has decided that's the "normal" way of things. At least they have a limited set of supported hardware, maybe they'll avoid breaking too many peoples' stuff with their "improvments."
Further back in antiquity (2000-ish), PalmOS was testing an OS update and apparently my application "made the grade" as a representative sample, and they were concerned because their OS upgrade made my code run buggy. They contacted me out of the blue to get to the bottom of the issue. In the end, it turned out that my game was coloring a bit outside their lines for something between animation and sound generation, I forget what the actual manifestation was, but it amounted to: I can't do what I'm doing without breaking your API boundaries, and now you want to update your OS in a way that's breaking my functionality. Oh well. I forget if that new OS ever released or maybe that was around the time they imploded... whatever it was my game still runs on the emulators without that problem.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05, @09:47PM (1 child)
Whenever the massive pile of kernel vulnerabilities died down, they released the new kernel. Not really any reason to stay with 6.12 instead of 6.18. Not sure why the article thinks a kernel version change needs to come with an OS release version change. Also not sure why they think a PC from 2011 would have 3GB of DDR2 memory, when the standard at that time was 8GB of DDR3 (unless you had one of the funny three-memory-channel Westmere or Nehalem CPUs, where you'd have either 6 or 12), or why they think X11 has better GPU support than Wayland (of all the things about Wayland that suck, hardware support is not one of them) or why they can't spell labwc. Just a sloppy article all around.
And presumably the reason why nobody maintains RPI Desktop for x86 is because it was based on the 32-bit version of RPI OS, and a 32-bit OS for x86 these days is as useless as a screen door on a battleship. Doing it for 64-bit would require starting completely over.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bentonite on Tuesday July 07, @04:18AM
It wasn't unusual for mid range computers from 2011 to have 3-4GB of DDR2 or DDR3 - budget computers had 1-2GB - while 8GB wasn't uncommon, it was expensive, especially if the motherboard only had 2 RAM slots.
32 bit versions of windows couldn't map much more than 3GB of memory - therefore an extra GB of RAM would be mostly wasted money.
After all, microsoft set a minimum requirement of 1GB for 32 bit windows 7, which of course manufacturers proceeded to meet - the "Starter" i686 version even restricted the max amount of RAM to 2GB!
X11 does have better GPU support than wayland - X11 will happily run in whatever framebuffer mode you can get the GPU into - while wayland will likely refuse to work without 3D acceleration (I see an article from 2010 about patches that allow wayland to render to a fbcon, but I can't work out of those were merged).
The reason the i686 RPi desktop is based off an old version of Debian, is because Debian dropped i686 support.
I do have an i686 computer running Gentoo GNU/Linux-libre with 1GB of RAM - it's plenty useful - it has better performance and software compatibility than at least the first 2 RPi models.
It'll continue to be further environmentally damaging to continue to throw out all the i686 hardware and then manufacture new hardware (considering that such old hardware can do such tasks fine) - although how many GNU/Linux distros have dropped i686 support, due to becoming unusable on such fast hardware, due to becoming massively bloated (especially induced by adding lots of proprietary software).
Too bad there is only really free BIOS support for 64bit hardware (the ThinkPad T60 (non-ATI) is by default i686 and supported, although it's faster with a 64 bit core 2 Duo CPU), but at least there usually isn't digital handcuffs stopping you from adding support.
(Score: 3, Touché) by jb on Monday July 06, @07:43AM (1 child)
And here was silly old me thinking that pi was its version number...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bentonite on Tuesday July 07, @04:30AM
π is the version number for TeX - an extra number to the decimal approximation is added every release.