Raspberry Pi OS now comes with Wayland support by default across all Raspberry Pi models

The Raspberry Pi team has introduced a new version of Raspberry Pi OS, marking a pivotal shift with the default inclusion of Wayland support. This transition to Wayland has been a decade in the making, with initial considerations beginning around ten years ago. At that time, Wayland was not yet viable for use. In 2021, with the release of Bullseye, the team adopted a new X window manager, Mutter, which could also function as a Wayland compositor.

The 2023 release of Bookworm saw further advancements as Mutter was replaced with Wayfire, a dedicated Wayland compositor, making Wayland the default for Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 models. However, due to performance issues on older models, X remained in use for them.

The breakthrough came with the discovery of labwc, a compositor built on wlroots, a set of libraries integral to Wayland systems. After extensive optimization, labwc was successfully ported to the Raspberry Pi Desktop, achieving performance parity with X on older models.

The team has now announced that Raspberry Pi Desktop operates with Wayland by default across all models, enhancing touch screen support and Raspberry Pi Connect integration. Users updating from Bookworm will be prompted to switch to labwc upon rebooting.