New release of Raspberry Pi OS brings Wayland to all models with a new compositor

The Raspberry Pi team have released a brand new version of the Raspberry Pi OS that brings with it Wayland support to all models.

As detailed in the announcement they've dropped their Wayland compositor called wayfire, and replaced it with labwc, which is based on a wlroots. They say this project was a "much better fit for the Raspberry Pi graphics hardware" and when speaking to the developers they found "their future direction very much aligned with our own".

They've been working on it for most of this year in collaboration with the developers of both labwc and wlroots, and now it's reached the point where it runs just as fast as Xorg on older Raspberry Pi models and so the latest released Raspberry Pi OS runs Wayland by default across all models.

Some other improvements in this release include:

• Significantly improved support for using the Desktop with a touch screen.
• Better Raspberry Pi Connect integration.
• A better and rewritten panel application for the taskbar at the top of the screen.
• A new Screen Configuration tool.

Seems 2025 will truly be the year of Wayland on Linux with most distributions and desktops now being in pretty good shape with it.