Raspberry Pi's LXDE Interface Is Being Refined

The Debian-based Raspbian Linux distribution that's widely used among Raspberry Pi owners is receiving a bit of a facelift for its LXDE user interface.

Simon Long has joined the Raspberry Pi Foundation as a UX engineer and has been initially tasked with improving the Raspbian user interface. "I took a look at the LXDE environment in Raspbian on day one, and, while perfectly functional, I felt it could do with a bit of a tidy up. I’m not about making changes for the sake of change, but a lot of the behaviour was inconsistent and potentially confusing to the user, and I wanted to fix that as a priority," explained Simon in a new blog post today on the Raspberry Pi blog.

Simon has mostly been making subtle changes to Raspbian's LXDE desktop while some changes are larger like moving the menu bar to the top of the screen. There's also been menu improvements, no icons on the desktop by default besides the trash, etc.

The modified Raspbian desktop found in this week's Raspbian 2014-12-24 is considered just the first release. More alterations to the Raspbian desktop are expected going forward -- including improvements to accessing WiFi networks among other items. This week's Raspbian update also has new firmware files for the Raspberry Pi, package updates, and other improvements.

More details on the ongoing Raspberry Pi desktop UX work can be found via this RaspberryPi.org blog post from this morning.