In October, we celebrated the release of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. It’s a landmark iteration of the Pi operating system, and going forward, it will be remembered as the first version of Raspberry Pi OS to include a dark mode.
Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm is extremely ambitious. It makes several changes to Pi OS’ underlying architecture and replaces the old X11 display system with Wayland. In effect, the operating system is far less cumbersome, far more attractive, and potentially more secure.
But an OS revision of this scale can be buggy. Major Pi OS versions usually get their first “bug-fix release” after just one or two weeks. This time, it took two months to patch the OS. In any case, the extended bug-squashing session turned out to be a good thing, as Raspberry Pi’s Simon Long used the opportunity to create an official Pi OS dark mode.
The default Raspberry Pi OS theme, called PiXflat, was introduced in 2019. As explained by Simon Long, the PiXflat theme is basically a long CSS file. Anyone who tried to customize their old MySpace or Tumblr profile should be familiar with CSS; it’s a deceptively simple and endlessly time-consuming style language.
Unfortunately for Simon Long, the color values in PiXflat were hard coded. Replacing each color value in the CSS would give us a dark theme, but it would create a new problem—there’d be two distinct style sheets. Every update to the light theme would need to be manually applied to the dark theme. So, all of PiXflat’s color values were replaced by variables. Creating a variation on the PiXflat theme is now a simple task. Just write a new color palette that lines up with the correct variables, and you’re good to go.
If you want to try the new dark theme, called PiXnoir, you’ll need the latest version of Pi OS Bookworm. Once it’s installed and opened, click on the Raspberry Pi icon in the top-left corner of your screen, open “Preferences,” and click “Appearance Settings.” A small window will appear onscreen. Navigate to the “System” tab, and select the dark theme.
Source: Raspberry Pi
