A new version of the Raspberry Pi Imager, a free, open source and cross-platform image writing utility (think Etcher, but much redder) is out with a bunch of modest improvements.

This is the first release of the tool since last September, when the app delivered its Qt 6 port and made an official AppImage available to download (keep reading if you use that format since there’s been a major change).

Raspberry Pi Imager 1.9.4 builds on the progress made in previous releases, smoothing out the rough edges of those prior big changes with a series of smaller quality-of-life ones.

For instance, in the OS customisation settings there’s an Enable SSH tab. This now uses “regex to perform some light validation” of public keys to avoid boot failures, having previously assumed any key entered was correct.

Raspberry Pi Imager 1.9.4 adds an ‘Exclude System Drives’ checkbox to the Storage selection UI (where you select the drive you want to flash the ISO/IMG to). Unchecking this box will show all available system drives in the destination list1, prime for picking…

Some of the changes on show

Devs working on the Pi Imager say the new toggle box “will be most beneficial in the Network Installer, where attached NVMe or USB drives may incorrectly be flagged as ‘system’ drives.”

The toggle box is checked by default (meaning system drivers are hidden from view) and most will want to keep those hidden since, y’know, wiping the system by accident is never fun!

Talking of storage drive destinations: anyone who upgraded to the v1.9.0 release and found the storage list filled up with partitions as well as disk will be pleased to hear that’s now resolved, thanks to some lsblk --tree pruning.

Raspberry Pi Imager can flash most ISO or IMG files to an SD card, USB stick or external storage device. You don’t have to own a Raspberry Pi to use this — I use it to make all my live USBs of Ubuntu now that Etcher is such a bloatfest!

Wayland client support in the Raspberry Pi Imager AppImage build—and only that build—has been disabled (the app still runs under XWayland, so don’t fret). This unfortunate decision has been taken for a sound reason: –

“Wayland composition flags in the Qt AppImage support are not safe to use – they include a system-owned copy of libwayland-client that is cross-called by the system Mesa – outside of the AppImage“, so a until a fix is found, it’s off in those builds.

All being well, a future update will re-enable native Wayland client support for the AppImage builds — if Wayland support is paramount, just download the official DEB package instead.

Other changes of note:

  • Removed the ‘Show password’ checkbox from OS customisation
  • Windows installer and binaries are now signed
  • Support for more archive formats via libarchive
  • All in-app popups now properly respond to Esc key
  • Faster download and archive extract performance
  • Dependency bumps, including Qt 6.9.0 & cURL 8.13.0
  • Translation updates

In all, a nice uplift for this versatile utility.

Download Raspberry Pi Imager

You can download the latest stable release of Raspberry Pi Imager from the project GitHub (be sure to unfurl the ‘assets’ to access all available builds, and make sure you download the correct architecture for your system – aarch64 looks a lot like amd64 if not paying attention).

You can also download it from the official Raspberry Pi website but that’s not been updated to point to the new builds at the time of writing).

The app supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. The minimum supported Ubuntu version for the DEB version is Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but the AppImage build may run on older versions – try it and let me know, I guess!

  1. AIUI, the app would determine at runtime whether to show system drives in this list (with no option to hide if shown). The new checkbox gives the user the ability to choose to see them (system drives are hidden by default). ↩︎