New Raspberry Pi OS switches everyone over to Wayland

The slow rise of Wayland hasn’t really been slow anymore for years now, and today another major part of the Linux ecosystem is making the jump from X to Wayland.

So we made the decision to switch. For most of this year, we have been working on porting labwc to the Raspberry Pi Desktop. This has very much been a collaborative process with the developers of both labwc and wlroots: both have helped us immensely with their support as we contribute features and optimisations needed for our desktop.

After much optimisation for our hardware, we have reached the point where labwc desktops run just as fast as X on older Raspberry Pi models. Today, we make the switch with our latest desktop image: Raspberry Pi Desktop now runs Wayland by default across all models.
↫ Simon Long

Raspberry Pi Desktop already used Wayland on some of the newer models, through the use of Wayfire. However, it turned out Wayfire wasn’t a good fit for the older Pi models, and Wayfire’x development direction would move it even further away from that goal, which is obviously important to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They eventually settled on using labwc instead, which can also be used on older Pi models. As such, all Pi models will now switch to using Wayland with the latest update to the operating system.

This new update also brings vastly improved touchscreen support, a rewritten panel application that won’t keep removed plugins in memory, a new display configuration utility, and more.