Raspberry Pi OS Now Based On Debian 12 "Bookworm" + Wayland

[Mateus Felipe]

Is it available for older devices? I have a Raspberry Pi 3B that I haven't used for some years. If I decide to reuse it, will it receive these updates?

[partcyborg]

Do they support upgrading existing installs or do we have to reinstall from scratch with this new version?

In place upgrades work fine, as they do with all (sanely built) dpkg/apt based distros

[esbeeb]

There's a "Support Thread" in their forum, where many "wayfire"-related (Wayland-related) bugs are being found:

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=357538

[DMJC]

It's not Wayland that's the issue, it's the desktop environments that haven't enabled Wayland yet. e.g MATE, GNUstep has at least preliminary support but hasn't finalised it based on git notes. There are many other window managers/desktop environments that haven't added Wayland support yet.

[devling]

Been running wayland on KDE Plasma since the start of 2023 with pretty much 0 issues. Actually less issues than X that I used before. I mean, is it still missing some bugfixes, polish and features? Yes. Is it a hell of a lot better than the old dumpster fire that X is? Also yes.

[willmore]

In place upgrades work fine, as they do with all (sanely built) dpkg/apt based distros

https://www.raspberrypi.com/document...ystem-versions disagrees with you.

Upgrading an existing image is sometimes possible, but is not guaranteed to work in every circumstance and we do not recommend it. If you do wish to try upgrading your operating system version, we strongly suggest making a backup first. We accept no responsibility for the loss of any data during a failed update.

The end of their announcement also covered it pretty well:

This time, because the changes to the underlying architecture are so significant, we are not suggesting any procedure for upgrading a Bullseye image to Bookworm; any attempt to do this will almost certainly end up with a non-booting desktop and data loss. The only way to get Bookworm is either to create an SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager, or to download and flash a Bookworm image from here with your tool of choice.

[skeevy420]

It's not Wayland that's the issue, it's the desktop environments that haven't enabled Wayland yet. e.g MATE, GNUstep has at least preliminary support but hasn't finalised it based on git notes. There are many other window managers/desktop environments that haven't added Wayland support yet.

Wayland is a bit of a chicken and egg issue. It's a protocol with a reference implementation. People have to develop around the protocol to suit their needs which has lead to NIH syndrome since all the major environments have had to reinvent the wheel. That wouldn't necessarily have been the case if the reference implementation, Weston, was a little more modular and was used by more projects. Do you blame the protocol or the reference? Or both? That's rhetorical.

These days, a combination of wlroots fulfilling the modular role and the NIH projects nearing feature completion means that Wayland is just less of an issue. It's still an issue for the smaller projects that can't tap into a shared library for window drawing and management functions like they've been able to do. Now they have to either NIH the wheel, adapt their wheel to wlroots (or a more complex one), or come up with an alternative for wlroots, Weston, Mutter, KWin, and others...queue up the XKDC Standards comic. The difference between today and when Wayland came out is that nowadays the smaller projects have alternatives to work with, especially since the community at large has thrown a lot of eggs into the wlroots basket.

[DMJC]

https://www.raspberrypi.com/document...ystem-versions disagrees with you.


The end of their announcement also covered it pretty well:

Respectfully, the documentation is incorrect, I upgraded my Raspberry pi 4 from Raspian to Debian and then Debian 11 to Debian 12 without any issues.

[kurkosdr]

Is it available for older devices? I have a Raspberry Pi 3B that I haven't used for some years. If I decide to reuse it, will it receive these updates?

The latest "Bookworm"-based Raspberry PI OS is listed as compatible with the 3B and 3B+:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/

Don't ask how it runs, I haven't tried it. I might have a play with it this weekend (I have the 3B+) if I have time.

Note: As usual, you are better off using the official MicroSD disk imaging utility (see here) and choosing the OS you want from there, the reason I linked to the above page is to point out that they consider it compatible with the 3B and 3B+.

[willmore]

Respectfully, the documentation is incorrect, I upgraded my Raspberry pi 4 from Raspian to Debian and then Debian 11 to Debian 12 without any issues.

Oh, well, if it happened to work for one person, then the Foundation needs to pledge support for it for everyone.