Raspberry Pi users now have the option of running a legacy version of the Raspberry Pi OS, allowing them to rely on a stable platform for several years.
The new version of the operating system is called Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy), and it’s based on the Debian Buster release. Hardware-accelerated Chromium has been removed and replaced with the upstream software-accelerated browser. This removes a lot of the headaches around supporting hardware-accelerated Chromium, which always requires the latest version fo Debian due to security patches.
Legacy will also use the 5.10 Linux kernel and only take security patches. The same is true for the Raspberry Pi firmware, which has been branched and will only receive security and hardware support patches for existing products.
So why is there a need for a legacy operating system? The team at Raspberry Pi realized that certain sets of users benefit from having a stable environment to work in with years of support guaranteed, rather than having to scramble to ensure their Pi hardware/software projects still work when a new OS version rolls out. The education and industrial sectors are two good examples of this.
If you’d like to run Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) on your Pi, it’s already available to download. Support will continue for as long as “the various components continue to receive updates,” which means June 2024 for Debian Buster and Dec. 2026 for Linux kernel 5.10. It’s also key to point out that this Legacy OS will not be supported by new hardware, so while it will run on any existing and new models of the Raspberry Pi 4 (as well as all previous Pi boards), it won’t be available for the Raspberry Pi 5 when that eventually launches.
