The Raspberry Pi Foundation today released a new version of the official Raspberry Pi OS distribution for the Raspberry Pi computer, bringing updated components, bug fixes, and various performance improvements.
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The biggest change in the Raspberry Pi OS 2023-05-03 version is that the kernel has changed from the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS to the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS, which will bring better performance to the Raspberry Pi computer.
Existing Raspberry Pi OS users executing the rpi-update command in a terminal emulator will be upgraded to run Linux kernel 6.1 LTS. Linux 6.1 LTS is now the default kernel on new Raspberry Pi OS images.
Various applications have been updated in the new Raspberry Pi OS version, most importantly Chromium 113, which is the default browser for Raspberry Pi OS, and not only includes all the latest security updates, but the new version brings WebGPU support by default, which is expected to improve Web GPU support. App performance and overall browsing experience.
The new Raspberry Pi OS release also includes Raspberry Pi Imager 1.7.4, RealVNC Viewer 7.0.1.48981, RealVNC Server 7.0.1.49073, Mathematica 13.2.1, and Matlab 23.1.0, and also brings an updated VLC hardware acceleration patch, available at Provides better performance when playing video files.
The libcamera and libcamera-apps components have also been updated in new Raspberry Pi OS releases to improve IMX296 sensor tuning, improve audio resampling and encoding handling using the libav library, improve Qt preview window rendering performance, improve thumbnail rendering, add support for 16 -bit supports Bayer in DNG writer, adds handling of generalized statistics, and fixes an overflow that would cause the AGC algorithm to compute incorrectly.
The new Raspberry Pi OS release also updates the picamera2 library, accepts an MJPEG server example using a hardware MJPEG encoder, shows an example of two camera previews in a single Qt application, H.264 encoder accepts SPS header frame time interval capability, renders Proper profile/level, support for constant quality parameters, and new Exif DateTime and DateTimeOriginal tags added.
The new Raspberry Pi OS release also addresses some bugs, including occasional bugs in the CPU temperature plugin, X11 server crashes when changing screen orientation, and X11 server DPMS not working, and adds some new language translations.
