Raspberry Pi systems can bask in that new operating system glow today, with the launch of the latest edition of the tiny computer’s Debian-based OS. This release features many smaller tweaks, but the headline features seem to be an improved Python camera interface, and a simplified ability to easily make a Raspberry Pi into a wireless access point.
Behind the scenes, this means Pi OS has moved from using the easily edited but slightly obscure dhcphd file to manage networking to the NetworkManager application already used by other Linux distributions. It’s not the default yet, dhcphd is still there, but it will become so in future releases so we’d better get used to it.
Elsewhere, the new Picamera2 Python library takes over from the original PiCamera (a community developed project which grew from a personal project) as the "Pythonic" means to interface a camera with your Pi. It is claimed to be easier to use, but differs from the older software. The libcamera library, which offers a command line interface via the terminal is still available for those not ready to PiCamera2.
