An updated look for the Raspberry Pi Desktop

Some optional new features which might enhance your experience of 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.