An updated look for the Raspberry Pi Desktop

An updated look for the Raspberry Pi Desktop Today brings you some optional updates to the Raspberry Pi Desktop, which gains some modern features while keeping its simplicity. What is currently known as the Raspberry Pi Desktop has been around for over a decade now – it started out as a mildly customised version of the stock LXDE desktop, and over the years has slowly evolved into something with almost entirely different underpinnings, based on Wayland and labwc. The look has been refreshed on several occasions, with new icons, themes and desktop backgrounds, to the point where there is very little visually in common between today’s Raspberry Pi Desktop and the original LXDE. But one thing which has never changed is the overall feel of the desktop, which, with its taskbar, status icons and main menu launcher, is very reminiscent of the state of the art in desktop design from 30 years or so ago, with Windows 95 and Apple System 7. Not without good cause – both were good examples of an intuitive desktop interface, and they have the benefit of being very familiar to most users. The intention has always been to offer a desktop experience which most people can simply use without a learning curve, and I believe our Desktop has offered that. Desktop designs have continued to evolve in that time, and last year, I started to think that some of the features which are now commonplace in other desktops might be beneficial in ours. Since then, I have been working on a few ideas for how we might add these features to the desktop – not losing the fundamental simplicity of it, and not forcing change for the sake of change on users who are happy with the way it is, but just providing some more options. I do have to stress here, before the anticipated deluge of complaints, that these new features are entirely optional; unless you choose to enable them, your desktop will continue to look and feel exactly the way it always has. These are purely intended to give users who want a more up-to-date desktop experience the option to have one if they want it. (So please, don’t immediately leap to the comments and complain that you don’t like the new look and we should never have changed it – if you do, I’ll know you didn’t actually bother reading what I wrote…) So, assuming you do fancy a change, what do you get? The icon dock and launcher The biggest change is the introduction of an icon dock, which can either replace the existing taskbar, or be used in addition to it. Two new widgets have been added which are intended to be used in the dock – one is a graphical application launcher, and the other an icon-based combined quick launcher and task list. The raspberry icon for the graphical application launcher opens the launcher screen. (This is intended as a replacement for the main menu widget which has been the standard application launcher up until now.) This shows all the application icons which would have been in the main menu. By default, icons are sorted in alphabetical order, but they can be dragged and dropped to rearrange them. Single-clicking any icon launches the application; right-clicking (or a long press on a touchscreen) brings up a context-sensitive menu similar to that shown in the traditional main menu. The search box can be used to filter the displayed applications, and the cursor keys and ‘enter’ can be used to navigate and select applications from the keyboard. Right-clicking the raspberry icon and selecting the ‘Configure Icon Menu Widget’ option gives some configuration options for the launcher. Enabling alphabetical sorting undoes any drag-and-drop rearrangement and restores the default order of icons. Enabling menu categories makes the launcher hierarchical, with a top-level screen for application category icons which can then be clicked to enter individual launcher screens for each category – this is useful if you have a large number of applications installed. To help with remembering which applications are in which category, turning on composite category icons shows miniature versions of the first four application icons in each category in the top-level screen instead of the category icons themselves. (If menu categories is enabled, then drag-and-drop can no longer be used to rearrange the launchers; instead, the hierarchy and arrangement used for the main menu is used, which can be edited using the Main Menu panel in Control Centre as before.) By default, the icons are displayed overlaid on the current desktop background, but in the event that this looks too cluttered, a transparent or opaque overlay colour can be applied. The new task list The combined quick launcher and task list can display a set of the most commonly-used application icons, and will by default show the same set of icons as the original quick launcher from the taskbar. New applications can be added by right-clicking an entry in the main menu or the graphical application launcher and choosing ‘Add to Launcher’ from the context-sensitive menu. As for the application launcher, icons in the quick launcher can be reorganised by dragging and dropping. Clicking an icon launches the application. Running applications – whether launched from the quick launcher or elsewhere – are shown with a superimposed count of the application’s open windows. If an application was already in the quick launcher, this count is superimposed on the existing icon; if the application was not in the launcher, its icon is added to the end and the count is superimposed on the new icon. Clicking on an icon for a launched application brings all that application’s windows to the foreground. If all the application’s windows are already in the foreground, a new window is opened (if the application supports multiple windows). Right-clicking an icon brings up a menu which shows all the application’s open windows, allowing them to be individually brought to the foreground, and offers options for maximising or hiding the application’s windows. Applications can be removed from the quick launcher by right-clicking the icon when the application is not running, and choosing ‘Remove from Launcher’ from the context-sensitive menu. These two new widgets are intended to offer alternatives to the existing main menu and window list, and while they are intended for use in the new dock, they can also be used in the original taskbar if desired; likewise, the original main menu and window list widgets can be used in the dock. Customising the dock The dock itself can be customised in the same way as the taskbar. A Dock page has been added to the Control Centre and offers options for colour, position and icon size. One often-requested feature which has been added is the ability for the taskbar and the dock to automatically hide when not in use – if the ‘Autohide’ option is enabled for either, it will slide away when the mouse is not over it, and reappear when the mouse is moved to the edge of the screen where it has hidden. The ‘Exclusive’ option controls whether a maximised window covers the taskbar or dock; if exclusive is set for either, maximised windows will not overlap it. This can be useful if you want, for example, the clock to always be visible. A new Widgets page has been added to the Control Centre which allows plugins to be placed in either taskbar or dock, and arranged as desired. The dock offers two locations for widgets. The left-hand side of the dock is the dock proper, while the right-hand side is given over to the ‘tray’. This is intended to hold status icons, which are shown as two rows with the icons half the size of those in the main dock. When icons are added to the tray, they are automatically split across the two rows such that the length of top and bottom is kept as consistent as possible. If more control over the split is required, the ‘tray split’ widget can be added to the tray widgets – this imposes a hard line break between the widgets at this point. In order for either the taskbar or the dock to be shown, they must contain at least one widget – if either contains no widgets, it is hidden. Note that the taskbar and the dock can be used simultaneously – for example, if desired, the status icons can be displayed on the taskbar as they are now, with just the new launcher and task list in the dock. (This is how my own desktop is configured.) I’d encourage you to play about with the Widgets control panel to come up with whatever arrangement of taskbar, dock and widgets works best for you, but in order to make it easy to try the new features, an option to switch between a few preset desktop styles has been added to the Defaults page in the Control Centre. Setting the style to ‘Dock’ will remove all widgets from the taskbar, add the new launcher and task list to the dock, and add the status icons in the tray. Setting the style to ‘Taskbar / Dock’ will add just the launcher and task list to the dock, while leaving the status icons on the right of the taskbar. Or if you just want the desktop as it has always been, set the style to ‘Taskbar’, which will leave the existing main menu and task list on the left of the taskbar, with the status icons on the right. Other changes One other small change which you can see in some of the pictures above is the addition of an analogue clock mode to the clock widget – simply right-click the digital clock, choose ‘Configure Clock Widget’, and turn on the analogue clock mode. The colour of the face and the hands can also be customised. In addition to the dock changes, there is now the ability to use a more efficient mechanism for drawing the desktop background picture. This has always been drawn by pcmanfm, the file manager application – as this is the file manager, it allows icons to be placed on the desktop. But if desktop icons are not required, significant memory savings can be made by using the very lightweight swaybg program to draw the desktop. This can be enabled in the Desktop tab of the Control Centre – switching off ‘Active Desktop’ disables the drawing of the desktop by the file manager and instead uses swaybg to display the same picture. (The Wastebasket which is normally displayed on the desktop can then be found in the Places pane in any file manager window.) We now recommend disabling the active desktop for any platform with less than 2GB of memory – this is checked at boot, and a notification is displayed suggesting that active desktop be disabled. Also, if you choose either of the new dock-based styles for the desktop in the Defaults page, active desktop is disabled by default, but it can be re-enabled from the Control Centre if desired. Note that the file manager was previously responsible for automounting removable drives; as this would no longer happen if the file manager was not running all the time, this functionality has now been moved into the ejecter plugin, which will now automount and display a notification when a drive is inserted. A new Shortcuts page has also been added to the Control Centre. This allows all system keyboard shortcuts to be viewed and edited, and new ones to be created if desired. (Note that this only covers general system shortcuts, not those which are assigned by individual applications.) One final change which has been made is an enhancement to the creation of screenshots. Previously, hitting the PrtScrn key took a shot of the entire screen and saved it to the Pictures folder. Now, hitting the key takes the screenshot and also opens a dialog offering the option to open the captured file in an image editor, or to copy it to the clipboard. (If you always want to do the same thing, just tick the ‘remember my choice’ checkbox before pressing one of the buttons, and the prompt will not be shown in future.) Holding down Alt when pressing PrtScrn does the same thing, but first displays a selection rectangle allowing you to select an area of the screen to be captured rather than the whole screen. How to get it We’ve released a new image today with all these new features added. As I said at the start, these features are all optional – if you install the new image, the default appearance of the desktop will be the same as it has always been, with a taskbar and no dock; to try the dock, just launch the Control Centre, go to the Defaults page, and select either the ‘Taskbar / Dock’ or ‘Dock’ styles. Similarly, for existing images, simply update using either the updater widget or the usual sudo apt update sudo apt full-upgrade from the terminal. Again, installing the updates will not enable the dock; use the Control Centre as above to try it. We do hope you enjoy using the new features – as always, do let us know in the comments or the forums how you get on, and what you think! 90 comments Jump to the comment form Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley A whole year’s work in one blog post?! Nice work, Simon Olydnad_SWE I beta tested this a little a while ago. Nice that stable is out now. Just downloaded it, and also installed it on a Raspberry Pi 5. Thanks to everyone who worked on it! Olydnad_SWE The dock disappears when you turn off the monitor and turn it on again. The same problem that was in beta for a while. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author I don’t see that here – the fix for that problem is still present and correct. Even disconnecting and reconnecting my monitor is not causing the dock to disappear. Can you please report this at https://github.com/raspberrypi-ui/wf-panel-pi with details of your system and I will try to work out what is going wrong? Olydnad_SWE It’s just a regular 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 with an NVMe SSD + a Dell 1080p screen, (u2417h). If I turn off the screen, dock disappears. If I turn off the screen a second time and start it, it is back. Weird! I’ll see if the problem is on my side. I did an update and not a new installation. I’m going to test with some Raspberry Pi monitors and see if I can figure out what the problem is. Unfortunately, I’m not much into GitHub and don’t really know how it works there. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author If you have a spare SD card or USB drive, I would suggest installing a clean copy of the new image as a first step – if that shows the problem, then it is a real issue and not an artefact of old or incompatible code. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author FWIW, I have now tried both power-cycling the monitor and disconnecting and reconnecting the cable completely on two different Pis and three different monitors, and the dock does not go away on any of them. Whatever this problem is, it seems to be something specific to your system. Anders Dock stays OK for me with monitor off and on. I’m using a Raspberry Pi monitor on HDMI2 Ray Allen Like it, downloading and updating now. Thanks to everyone at PiTowers that made this possible. It’s getting better and better. Aaron This is great! I am looking forward to trying this out on my one up. I think I like retro on the desktop at home but we shall see. Thanks for all the hard work! Sheddyian I like this. Just turning off the active desktop saves about 40Mb of memory usage – I barely used icons on the desktop. Just one note though – in file explorer, right clicking on a folder for “open in terminal” now gives a message “terminal emulator not set” Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Ooops – yes, you’re right about the terminal emulator option. For now, just type ‘x-terminal-emulator %s’ in the ‘Terminal emulator’ box in the preferences screen that opens when you try to do this; that will get it working. I’ll try and find how the default value has gone missing – shouldn’t take long to fix… Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author OK, fixed – there will be an update in apt in a few hours. Thanks for finding it! ComputerL Wow, this is great! Good job everyone. Hubert RPI5: i wanted to test it and have now many problems: I set the desktop to “taskbar + dock”, the taskbar jumped to the top without any icons and no dock. After a reboot there was the empty taskbar and a dock, the control center can’t be runned by clicking on control center, but sudo rpcc started the control center, the settings for the dock and the configuration of the desktop are missing. And now? Hubert Apps like geany and terminal seem to have forgotten their settings like font-size. Even if i set the taskbar to the bottom with sudo rpcc, the setting is ignored. If i want to start rpcc without sudo in the terminal, i get “Speicherzugriffsfehler” Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author You should never use sudo to run rpcc, and if you have done so in the past, that is almost certainly causing your current problems. I would suggest deleting the .config directory (inside your home directory), running Control Centre from the menu, and re-initialising on the Defaults tab by choosing the option for medium screens. Hubert i never used rpcc from the command line, running with sudo was only a try to get it work. Deleting .config helped, but now can i no more add the plugins like CPU, GPU … There are buttons for remove, move left and right, configure, but there is no “add” button … Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author The Add buttons are underneath the list boxes on the left hand side… Hubert Oooh, sorry. Tomatoes on the eyes 🍅🍅 Thank you 😀 Emanuele tried to update but not found. Is it available for existing bookworm installations? Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author This is for trixie only. It won’t be made available for bookworm, which is now only receiving security updates. Olydnad_SWE I have now tested a little. It looks like my update did not turn out well. Did a clean install on test, and works as it should now. Is it possible I made too much changes from stock OS? I usually change a lot. Tried a couple of times now and everything works. However, I’ll test further for a while and see if it comes back. I use the same Dell monitor as before. Just a clean install! Open in terminal works for me without the last updates, as I haven’t updated yet. Read about it here. I can’t find a reply button on your answer. I’ll answer here instead. If it doesn’t fit, just delete it ;). Jack Just tried it out. Works fine on the Pi5. Though it requires setting desktop background again. I had a problem, it didn’t seem to work on my 400. The dock was not visible. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Check the Screens control panel – set to the maximum resolution supported by your display and then back to whatever resolution you were using – the display settings might have got corrupted so you aren’t seeing the entire screen. Jack That worked, thankyou. Jan After today’s update my Pi 400 now shows a black screen for some seconds every minute or so. GrahamJ I ran the update but the “Run” and “Shutdown” options are missing from the main menu in Taskbar view. They are also missing in the Main Menu list in Control Centre (so I can’t re-enable them that way. I tried a couple of extra reboots (had to use Ctrl/Alt/Delete to get the shutdown options) but no difference. Pi 500+ with no particular changes to Trixie OS. Any advice appreciated thanks. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Check you have the packages pishutdown and gui-runcmd installed – sounds like they may be missing for some reason. Also, bear in mind that the Run option has moved to the Accessories menu in this release – you can use the Main Menu panel in Control Centre to move it back to the top-level menu if you prefer it there, but it isn’t something that many people ever use, so it seemed strange to have it in such a prominent position; just a legacy of the fact that LXDE put it there 15 years ago and I never got around to moving it… Shutdown should still be in the top-level menu. GrahamJ Thanks for the reply. Shutdown was in the top-level menu before the update. These are installed: pishudown-0.42 (64bit) gui-runcmd-0.3 (64bit) Thanks. Barja Cayarm Shiny new (optional) features AND a massive blog explaining them? This is utterly fantastic stuff, Simon. As someone who personally hates documenting my code (I know) I take off my hat to you twice over. Well done, great work! Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Thank you! (I have to admit, though, that I quite like writing documentation. I know how weird that is for a software engineer… ;) ) Anil Kimar Just tried. Loved it (Love at first sight kinda) Anil Kumar Just tried at Pi 5 OS Desktop (Trixie) . Loved it (Love at first sight kinda) KC Eager to see that in a x86 distro with Trixie! Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author You may not have to wait very long for that… ;) KC Working on one for about a month now. Anders This has made the combination of Pi 500+ and CM5 based Argon OneUP laptop the greatest line up in the history of computing. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author I don’t think I’d go *quite* that far – but I am very glad you like it so much! rclark Glad the changes are all ‘optional’ :) . Yes, I read your nice article! More options is always a good thing as no two of us are alike. Tis why we have lots DEs to pick from in the Linux desktop/workstation/server world. As for me, I use the desktop to run applications. So ‘bling’ isn’t a concern. Akkie Very cool updates! I hope to send you an updated version of the Japanese translation in the near future. And I found little issue: Switching between styles on the taskbar and the dock will reset the wallpaper to default. I’d like the wallpaper settings to be retained. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author The resetting of wallpaper when switching styles is deliberate – switching dock style resets everything to a default state, just like pressing the buttons on that page. It’s possible to just switch the dock and not change anything else, but changing dock mode does also need to change things like the active desktop state (to hide the wastebasket) and the file manager config (to add it to the places view), and so on. It’s simpler and more reliable to do it all from a known state, at least for now. Once people have got the idea of the dock and of what other options work well with it, I can look at making that control just change the dock and nothing else, but for now it should be viewed as “set the recommended defaults for this dock mode”, rather than just “change the dock to this” – which is why it is on the Defaults page. Akkie Thank you for your reply. I understand! Sebastian Pretty nice update. I always wanted the dock feature for my daily driver Pi 5. But I got a bug with the new launcher on a freshly installed OS. Every time I start a program with the new launcher, the wf-panel-pi restarts and it shows the Wi-Fi network status notification again. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author I can’t see how that can happen on a fresh install – the launcher has been extensively tested; something else on your system is causing it. Is it a specific application you are launching that causes it, or is it a specific application? Are you running locally, or over some sort of remote connection? What have you done to the system since the fresh image? sebastian I tested it again on a new freshly installed OS where I only changed the style to dock. While testing, it seems that wf-panel-pi only restarts after I use the search function of the new menu to start a program. Even if I already got a running instance of the text editor and just open it again with the new menu after I use the search function, wf-panel-pi will restart. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Ah – yes, you’re quite right – something odd is happening in search. I’ll sort that now… Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author OK, fix uploading as I type – should be available from an apt update in the next couple of hours. Thanks for the report! Mr. U.S.A Many talented people from shuttered game studios have be displaced. Raspberry Pi LTD should consider video game development with a small team to develop 2D and 3D games for Raspberry Pi computer series. Raspberry Pi Foundation should consider teaching game development. All these initiatives could increase the value or desire for Raspberry Pi computers. Also consider designing an eGPU for the Raspberry Pi computers. Raspberry Pi Staff Helen Lynn While we might not diversify into games development, we do make things to help people develop related skills and have fun – see Code the Classics volume I and volume II. And while we’re not part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation any more, Code Club, which is, provides heaps of games resources aimed at the next generation of developers. Kevin McAleer Oh, now this is nice. Really elegant and simple to use. Great work guys! and Great write up Simon. PyThagoras Would it be possible to add an option to move the title bar’s window control buttons to the left side? Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author It’s already possible, but you will need to modify a config file in a text editor. In the file ~/.config/labwc/rc.xml, find the section and add the following line to it: iconify,max,close: The position of the colon is important! Then save and reboot. PyThagoras Thank you very much for your great work! Would it be possible to add a GUI option in the future? Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author To be honest, it’s unlikely – you are the first person to ask for this, so I don’t think there is a huge demand for it, and I try to keep the GUI options to the bare minimum that are of use to the maximum number of users. You could try building and installing https://github.com/labwc/labwc-tweaks, which I believe is a GUI tool for settings like this one. Anders Some of the desktop configuration like adding extra desktop spaces is done by editing config files might make good use of such a gui config tool. Ian Binnie Thanks for this. I used to routinely do this on older systems to make Raspberry Pi OS work the same as my normal computer, but had been unable to work out how using labwc. Maybe this should be included in documentation – I don’t mind editing files but finding out what to edit is the problem. Martin It looks nice, but I can’t open the Control Center. The Dock Preferences won’t open either…. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author The Dock preferences are part of the Control Centre, so if you can’t open one, you won’t be able to open the other. What happens if you open a terminal window and type “rpcc” followed by enter? Martin Hi Simon Thanks for the quick reply. Speicherzugriffsfehler (Memory access error) Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Someone else reported something similar a few posts back. I don’t know what causes this – it isn’t a problem I have ever seen. What I suggested to him – which I believe did fix it – was to delete the ~/.config folder, then reboot and try again. Let me know if that helps. Martin Yes, that helped. I’m back to the old layout and can open the Control Center again. I’m going to play around with it a bit more… Thank you so much for your help. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Great! Thanks for letting me know. I just wish I knew what it is that causes that problem, but as long as there is a workaround, I’ve got time to investigate. PyThagoras Thank you very for your great work! Would it be possible to add a GUI option for that in the future? Filip It seems to me that dock is Wayland only. It would be nice mentioning that explicitely. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Anything new on the Desktop has been Wayland-only for a few years now. X is only supported as a legacy product – there will be no updates to it, and we will probably end-of-life it in a future release. Tahar Switching from dock to taskbar and back will end up losing customizations. Also some dock settings made me lose the dock. Also a command working in the menu when using dock placing that on the desktop will end up with a link on the desktop that does not work. And setting it to the launcher will not work. It looks great but there are still some flaws. Sorry but I’m a type that digs in to all settings to see what happens. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author “Switching from dock to taskbar and back will end up losing customizations.” That is what is supposed to happen – see my explanation to Akkie above. “Also some dock settings made me lose the dock.” The autohide setting will hide the dock until you move the mouse over the relevant edge of the screen. “Also a command working in the menu when using dock placing that on the desktop will end up with a link on the desktop that does not work. And setting it to the launcher will not work.” I can place a shortcut on the desktop from the menu whether it is in the dock or the taskbar, and the shortcut works. I can similarly place a shortcut into the launcher from the menu or the icon menu, and that works too. I’m not entirely clear from your comment exactly what you are trying to do, but both launcher and desktop shortcuts work fine for me. Alan Nice update: I was really miffed with Apple when they took Launchpad away so it’s good to see an equivalent in Raspberry Pi OS. Another reason for me to move over completely… One oddity, though: when I connect a USB drive I get an error: “An operation is already pending” in place of the usual dialog asking if I want to open File Manager. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author What format is the drive you are mounting in? What partitions does it contain? Every drive I have tried has mounted correctly, but it is entirely possible that some formats are not supported correctly; if you can give me an idea of the format of the drive you are inserting, I can investigate. Alan This is weird. Yesterday I tried several devices on my Pi 500+: two Raspberry Pi 256GB Flash Drives, one formatted ExFAT with a Master Boot Record partition map, the other a bootable copy of my Pi 500+’s SSD created using the SD copy utility, and a MBR ExFAT SanDisk Micro SD card in a SanDisk USB reader and all of them gave me the error. Today the drives just mount with no message at all and I don’t see the usual dialog asking if I want to open File Manager. I’ve just tried the same drives on a new Pi 5 2GB that I’m setting up as a Pi-hole (new copy of the OS, updated via Add/Remove software Check for updates option) and I’m seeing the same error dialog on that as I did on the 500+ yesterday. Alan On the Pi 5, if I use a microSD card flashed with the current release dated 15/09/26 then the drives mount without an error. If I use a card that was flashed with the previous release and then updated the drives mount with the “An operation is already pending” error. So I’m guessing it could be a problem with the update? Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author OK, that’s helpful, thank you – I’ll investigate! Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Ah – I think I know what is happening. On an update, the default settings for pcman aren’t updating correctly so that it stops trying to do the automount itself – hence the automount in the ejecter finds that something is already doing an automount and hence reports the pending operation. I’ll see if I can find a way to force that parameter to be overridden. I suspect what has happened is that you have modified the config of pcman in your image so it has a local config file which includes the automount setting, and this is not then overridden by the new system config file which turns it off. That will be slightly awkward to fix, I think… Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Right, I have a fix for this, which is going through the build system as I type and should be available as an apt update in the next couple of hours. Only one thing at a time should be automounting – either the file manager or the ejecter plugin. What I think is happening is that if you had previously changed anything in the file manager preferences, its local config file will store the setting to enable automount, which means that the system setting to disable it is ignored. I have added a check to the ejecter plugin, so that if its own automount is enabled, it checks to see if the file manager’s automount is also enabled, and just silently turns it off if so. It’s a bit hacky, but it should work and be reasonably robust – I’d expect it to fix the problem you have reported – do shout if not! Jeff Haddow Outside of Style: Taskbar / Dock – the switch for changing the mouse to left hand use does not work. So using the Dock on it own is not available to me as RSI on the right hand makes using it for my mouse impossible. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author The switch to left-hand mouse works fine for me – I tested that before release, and it is still working on my image here. It’s completely independent of dock or taskbar – it is a setting made in the window manager; the dock makes no difference at all to it. Bear in mind that switching from dock to taskbar or vice-versa restores all system settings to their defaults – you will need to reset the left-handed mode after making such a change, as the default is for it to be off. William Stevenson A great success. My view is that OS changes like this are not as difficult as major changes to difficult programs, so if RPi has bothered to make the changes I just assume they’re likely to be good for me and I activate them and relearn. There are bound to be minor upsets- I was using Connect on a laptop at 1080p for which I have to disable the excellent permanently attached Hyperpixel Touch. Selecting the Dock/ Taskbar option sent the laptop mouse into disconcerting L-R mouse movement translates into Up-Down mouse pointer movement on the screen. Once I’d worked out how to move to select reboot, it came back correctly. FvS Hi Simon, Very nice work. Thanks to everybody who worked on it. Frans. hyle Am I mistaken, or should the article above say “Ctrl” instead of “Alt” for the screenshot shortcut? At least that’s what works for me. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Yes, quite right – typo on my part! If you look in the Shortcuts page in Control Centre, you can see the correct key binding – and even change it to Alt if that is what you prefer… hyle No problem! Personally, I’d avoid using ‘Alt’ in the keyboard shortcut in this case, as it also triggers the Magic SysRQ. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Good point – I think that might have been why I changed it! huuhanh I would really like to see the Raspberry Pi team continue developing **Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC (x86_64/amd64)**. The older Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC was a very useful project because it allowed users to enjoy the familiar Raspberry Pi OS desktop environment on normal Intel/AMD computers. It was especially useful for education, older PCs, development machines, and people who wanted the same desktop experience on both a Raspberry Pi and a standard PC. It would be great to have a new official version based on **Debian 13 (Trixie)** or even **Debian 14**, using the current Raspberry Pi OS desktop components and design. Ideally, the new PC version could include: * Raspberry Pi OS / PIXEL desktop appearance and configuration * current Raspberry Pi themes, icons, wallpapers and desktop utilities * an amd64/x86_64 Debian base * both Live ISO and normal installer support * UEFI and modern PC hardware support * updated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio and graphics support * Wayland support where possible, while retaining X11 compatibility * the same menu, panel, file manager configuration and desktop experience as current Raspberry Pi OS * regular package and security updates through Debian and Raspberry Pi repositories where technically possible It does not necessarily need Raspberry Pi-specific hardware features on PC. The main goal would be to provide the **same Raspberry Pi OS desktop experience on standard x86_64 computers**. There are still many people using small PCs, Intel NUCs, Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny systems, old laptops and educational computers where a modern Raspberry Pi Desktop would be an excellent lightweight operating system. Please consider bringing **Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC** back and continuing it with a modern Debian 13/14 base. I believe having the same desktop environment available on both Raspberry Pi hardware and standard PCs would also make Raspberry Pi education, software development and classroom deployment much easier. MW Already discussed, advisable to read previous responses before posting an unrelated wish list !! KC 15th September 2026, 10:06 pm Eager to see that in a x86 distro with Trixie! Reply to KC Simon Long avatar Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author 15th September 2026, 10:42 pm You may not have to wait very long for that… ;) Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author ;) Unformatted I’m a keyboard user most of the time. When i press the “Windows” key, the menu pops up. If i select “Logout” then the menu stays “up” and the small “Shutdown options” window appears. But it doesn’t have the focus. I have to press “Esc” to close the menu and then i have to use Alt+Tab to go to the “Shutdown options” window. Before this update, the menu would disappear and the “Shutdown options” window would have the focus. This is NOT happening when i use the mouse. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author Yes, I can repeat that – it is something to do with keyboard handling on items in the root of the menu. I’ll see if I can get a fix out today. Raspberry Pi Staff Simon Long — post author OK, trivial bug found and fixed – fix uploading, should be available in apt in the next couple of hours – please report back if you’re still having problems with it installed. Unformatted I just updated on this Pi5 and another Pi5 and can confirm all is working fine now after a reboot. Thank you for your prompt reply and action!