After years of effort in 2024, the Raspberry Pi teamis ready to use Wayland in the Raspberry Pi desktop environment.
Over the past year, the Raspberry Pi has invested significant development resources to support Wayland in its default system, Raspberry Pi OS.
Last year, Raspberry Pi OS migrated its graphical interface from X11/X.Org sessions to Wayland, using Wayfire as the lightweight Wayland compositor for the Raspberry Pi OS desktop.
The official Raspberry Pi team claims that the new Wayland-based desktop environment can provide better performance, improved system security, and a better experience for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 devices.
With the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS, all models of Raspberry Pi will default to Wayland once upgraded to the new system.
In the new version of Raspberry Pi OS, the preferred Wayland compositor has switched to Labwc, and users upgrading their existing systems will be prompted to switch to labwc or continue using the previous Wayfire compositor.
Raspberry Pi engineers state that the Wayland compositor labwc provides the best experience for their single-board computers—“We recommend most people switch to labwc”.
Engineers also noted in their blog that they began considering the switch to Wayland about 10 years ago, although at that time it was “far from ready.”
In recent years, the Raspberry Pi team has done a lot of development work to prepare for the actual transition:
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In the 2021 Bullseye version, using mutter as the X window manager, as it can also serve as a Wayland compositor
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In the 2023 Bookworm version, switching from mutter to wayfire and setting Wayland as the default for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5
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Finally switching to labwc, which is better suited for the graphical hardware of Raspberry Pi than wayfire
Labwc is built on wlroots, a modular system that allows building Wayland compositors without complete overhauls, making it easier to adapt to the needs of Raspberry Pi.
In addition to the default adoption of the new Wayland compositor labwc, this Raspberry Pi OS update also brings better touchscreen support, improved Raspberry Pi Connect integration, a rewritten panel application for the top screen taskbar, a new screen configuration tool named “raindrop,” and other improvements.
For detailed updates, see the official announcement: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-release-of-raspberry-pi-os/
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https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-release-of-raspberry-pi-os/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/raspberry-pi-oss-years-long-switch-from-x-window-to-wayland-is-now-official/
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-OS-Wayland-Default
