What are the pros and cons of the new Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye?

Question

What are the pros and cons of the new Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye?

Should I install it?

What benefits does it offer over Buster?

Are there outstanding issues?

Answer 1

This version seems to have been designed for users who use the GUI Desktop on a Pi4/Pi400 with little consideration for those running older models, headless or at CLI (and even less testing of these scenarios).

Unsurprisingly there are a number of issues, some of which have been addressed by updates, but the downloadable image is unchanged, so be prepared to upgrade, before anything else.

If you are using your Pi as a desktop computer then it appears to be quite usable, although PiCamera users should expect to adapt to new interfaces.

One thing to note ANY display oriented customisations in config.txt and most tutorials DO NOT apply to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye.

In response to the outstanding issues there is now an option to install Raspberry Pi OS Buster

What has changed

Debian Bullseye has relatively few changes which are visible to users – most of the changes are patches and upgrades to existing applications and features.

However, over and above the changes in Debian itself, the Bullseye version of Raspberry Pi OS has a number of significant changes to the Desktop Environment and to support for Raspberry Pi hardware.

All of the desktop components and applications are now using version 3 of GTK+

Window manager

One of the changes which was prompted by the move to GTK+3 is that it uses a new Window Manager Mutter instead of the Openbox Window Manager used in previous releases.

Mutter can only run properly on a Raspberry Pi with 2GB or more. On Raspberry Pis with less than 2GB the older Openbox Window Manager is still used.

VNC (all flavours) relies on the X Window System which is incompatible with Mutter. If you enable the in-built VNC server, you should have Openbox rather than Mutter.

Notifications

This release added a common notification manager to the taskbar, which can be used by the taskbar and any of its plugins, and can also be accessed via other applications.

Notifications are shown in windows at the top right corner of the screen, and are displayed in chronological order, with the most recent notifications being presented at the top. Notifications will automatically time out and be hidden after fifteen seconds, or can be cleared immediately by clicking on the windows.

Updater plugin

Another new feature, which makes use of the notification system, is an easy way to be informed about and to install system and application updates.

KMS video driver

The KMS (kernel modesetting) driver, which was an experimental option in previous releases, is now the standard video driver in this release.

New camera driver

The driver used by Raspberry Pi to access camera modules has now been replaced with libcamera, a standard Linux API.