Large print in Wayland

Wayland is a newer replacement for X11. In Wayland, a lot depends on the “compositor” component. These notes are for the Wayfire compositor, as shipped with the Raspberry Pi Desktop OS based on Debian 12 in 2023.

The new wlroots-based “LabWC” compositor in the Pi’s late-2024 update does not yet appear to support a global desktop scale factor like Wayfire did. It still supports Super+mousewheel zoom; beyond that, its “Appearance Settings” can set the size of menus but everything else needs per-application setting.

Screen magnification

• Hold down the ‘Super” key (the one with the commercial logo on it, called the “start” key in Windows) while scrolling with the mouse wheel.
• This gives full-screen GPU-driven magnification with panning, but it blurs and it doesn’t wait for the mouse to hit an edge before panning, so it doesn’t feel as stable as old X11 hardware zoom. Also the mouse pointer does not enlarge. We hope they’ll add more options for this in future.

Permanent desktop scaling

• The desktop, including the mouse pointer, can be scaled up without blur by editing ~/.config/wayfire.ini and adding a line like scale = 1.5 to an [output] section (e.g. [output:HDMI]—just create a section called [output] if none are there).
• As the resulting desktop is not scrollable and it limits what can be shown on screen, you might want to use just a moderate scale factor here and make up for the rest by setting larger fonts in applications. You can then maximise windows and use Alt-Tab to switch between them.
• A bug in at least some versions of Wayfire results in the scale being lost whenever you open any Preferences dialogue (such as to set keyboard layout) and you have to restart the session to get it back.

Legal

All material © Silas S. Brown unless otherwise stated. Debian is a trademark owned by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. HDMI is a trademark or registered trademark of HDMI Licensing LLC in the United States and other countries. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. Any other trademarks I mentioned without realising are trademarks of their respective holders.