Most of my Pis are headless — they run things, they don’t show things. But the ones with a screen sit where RAM is the whole budget, and the buried detail is the one I’ll actually use: turn off “Active Desktop” in the Control Center, let swaybg paint the wallpaper instead of the file manager, and stop paying for a file manager that runs forever. The devs now recommend this under 2 GB.
The rest is optional by design, which I respect more than the dock itself. A new icon dock, a launcher behind the raspberry, a Print-key dialog offering clipboard or editor — all opt-in. sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade, then change nothing and see if you miss it.
The story — The Raspberry Pi OS project released updated images modernizing a desktop the developers say still feels like Windows 95 or System 7, despite now running on Wayland and labwc rather than its original LXDE base. All new features are optional: an icon dock with graphical launcher and task list, swaybg wallpaper rendering recommended under 2 GB RAM, and a new Print-key screenshot dialog. (Source)