Putting Raspberry Pi OS through its paces
Raspberry Pi OS has undergone more than a modest version upgrade including a new set of tools for writing it to a bootable SD card.
You might have missed it in the excitement over the announcement of the Raspberry Pi 5 at the end of September, but a couple of weeks later, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also updated Raspberry Pi OS. The new release is quite significantly different from previous versions, so we thought we should take it for a spin.
Raspberry Pi OS 5.0 is based on Debian 12 "Bookworm," with a completely new Wayland desktop environment replacing PIXEL, the older desktop based on LXDE and X.org, augmented with Mutter in its previous release. There's also a new version of the Raspberry Pi Imager available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, which not only writes to SD cards but can also download the OS image for you as well.