Raspberry Pi Foundation introduces Pixel desktop environment

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has presented the Pixel desktop environment. Pixel replaces LXDE, which runs on Raspbian by default. Pixel is a retrospective abbreviation for Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight.

Pixel stems from the work of ux designer Simon Long, who joined the foundation two years ago. The desktop environment replaces, among other things, the notifications of booting with a splash screen. In addition, the icons and windows have had a makeover to make them look more modern. There are also 3 options for the Pi to switch off WiFi and Bluetooth.

The image also contains a few new applications. Among them are RealVNC Viewer, Sense Hat Emulator and in addition to browser Epiphany, a heavier browser has now been added, a variant of Chromium. On it, adblocker uBlock Origin and h264ify are enabled by default. The latter forces YouTube to serve videos in a format that can speed up the hardware. The foundation says that the browser can be slower on the first Pi and the Pi Zero.

Pixel can be downloaded directly from the Raspberry Pi Foundation site or installed directly on a Pi via the command-line.