Submitted by 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.
I have long (>2,5 years) been using Wayland on all of my graphics-enabled Raspberries, with no glitches. In fact, I switched my main environment over to Wayland precisely because it vastly outperformed X on my ARM hardware (the raspberries, but most important, my Lenovo C630 laptop). Not a glitch… Never looked back.
As someone who’s experienced the wayland problems, I’m not opposed to this switch as long as things are working. All of my gripes with wayland were pragmatic in nature. Reports suggest the latest version of KDE should solve the last of my wayland issues, and if so that’s great! I’m just waiting for it to come down the debian stable pipeline. I also have some Cinnamon and xfce desktops, those might take more time before being ready. I really wish screen sharing would have been a global wayland feature that just worked everywhere like in X. Alas, it is what it is.
They do always seem to gloss over the legacy issues and focus on look we fixed the latest and greatest. I understand that, but it’s not going to help me or get more of my users on Linux. I must have a bullet proof OOB RDC solution that doesn’t need a PhD to implement.
FWIW, I’ve been using Wayland on both a Pi 4 & 5 for quite a while now, I’ll have to test the update on the older model and see if the claims stack up.
This is the kind of progress I like to see with Wayland! It’s good to know that labwc is performant on older/slower hardware as well.
Now if only the Wayland devs can start caring about essential protocols like RDC, that’s the only real blocker for me to switch to using it daily. Right now all RDC clients I’ve tried under Wayland fail to render the remote desktop.
@Morgan
Yes let’s hope so, I’m keen to give it a try but because I’ve heard this all before(old hardware performance improvements) I’ll reserve my opinion. Until RDC works reliably it’s a no go for me on anything but the test beds.