Raspberry Pi OS gets supported legacy version based on Debian oldstable

Raspberry Pi is releasing an older version of Raspberry Pi OS for users who want stability for a longer period of time. Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) refers to the previous release based on Debian Buster-oldstable.

Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) is always behind a Debian release: as soon as Debian Bookworm appears, Raspberry Pi with (Legacy) will switch to Bullseye in its own words. Debian Buster, on which the current version of (Legacy) is based, will be supported until June 2024. Support for Linux 5.10 was extended at the beginning of this year until December 2026. The kernel only receives security patches.

The version of Chromium with hardware acceleration has been removed, as maintaining this feature is too much maintenance according to Raspberry Pi. Upcoming Raspberry Pi models will not receive support for Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy), but revisions of existing models will.

Raspberry Pi says that some users may prefer a stable OS. This includes educational institutions and industrial users of software that runs on certain library versions. Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) can be downloaded from the software page and is also part of Raspberry Pi Imager.