Raspberry Pi OS Gets a New Kernel but Apparently Not a New Version Number
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
The distro formerly known as Raspbian has received some modest tweaks - and a whole new kernel version.
Raspberry Pi Ltd is a little capricious when it comes to version numbering for Raspberry Pi OS, and although this release contains a fairly significant change, it doesn't seem to have a different version number. While PiOS is based on Debian 13 "Trixie," the company significantly customizes upstream Debian, including newer kernels.
For 13 years now, Raspberry Pi has been adding new sections to the top of a single release notes file, which tells us that this build is dated 2026-06-18 and updates the kernel from version 6.12.75 to version 6.18.34. Even so, the version number on the splash screen is strangely unchanged. It remains at 6.2, which was the modest securityupdate announced in April. Now there's a much bigger change - but no announcement and no new version number. So much for version numbers having meaning.
[...] So what is new in the latest version of PiOS? Well, the kernel is now version 6.18 from November, which became the LTS kernel within days. By default, PiOS 6 uses the labcw Wayland compositor with some components drawn from LXDE, such as the panel and file manager.
This is in place of its old customized version of LXDE, formerly called PIXEL. This release includes labwc version 0.9.7, replacingversion 0.9.2. You can still switch back to Openbox for an X11 desktop if you want, but this disables the Wayland-based Raspberry Pi Connect that was added a couple of years ago(and might yet make it over to Windows).
[...] We upgraded a testbed Pi 5 from the January release, and it went smoothly with no apparent difference - and it still only takes about 560MB of RAM under X11, which is very good for 2026. The new kernel means that some functions are slightly slower and some slightly faster, but you probably won't be able to tell. For the full lowdown, Linux news site Phoronix has extensive benchmarks.
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