There have been times when it seemed like X Window System would be with us forever, even though it is over 40 years old and the last real version came out in 2012. But with a lot of effort, some organizations and operating systems have moved on. Raspberry Pi has now joined the forward momentum, with the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS swapping in Wayland – and it hopes the change will be barely noticeable.
However, you may want to wait a while before upgrading.
Simon Long wrote on the Raspberry Pi blog that the organization started thinking about moving to Wayland about a decade ago, although it was far from ready for use at the time. Over the past few years, the Pi team has done a number of things to prepare for a real switch:
- Uses mutter as X window manager in the 2021 Bullseye release, as it can also be used as a Wayland compositor
- Switched from mumble to wayfire in the 2023 Bookworm release and made Wayland the standard for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5
- Switched one last time to labwc, which fits the Raspberry Pi graphics hardware better than wayfire
Because labwc is built on wlroots, a modular system that allows building a Wayland compositor without having to reinvent the entire canvas, it was easier to adapt to the needs of Raspberry Pi. After efforts throughout 2024, the team is ready to call it the year of Wayland on Raspberry Pi desktops.
“After much optimization of our hardware, we have reached the point where labwc desktops run as fast as X on older Raspberry Pi models,” Long wrote. “Today we are making the switch with our latest desktop image: Raspberry Pi Desktop now runs Wayland by default on all models.”
