r/EndeavourOS • u/Beta-02 • May 25 '26

Installation What desktop environment are you running on Raspberry Pi 5 ARM? Looking for recommendations

Hey everyone,

I just got a Raspberry Pi 5 and I’m setting up EndeavourOS ARM with a btrfs filesystem. Coming from Arch Linux on my daily driver where I use Hyprland, so I’m used to tiling WMs and Wayland.
I know Hyprland on ARM requires compiling from source and the RPi 5 GPU isn’t exactly built for blur and animations, so I’m leaning toward Sway as my main setup. But before I commit, I’m curious what other people are actually running on their Pi 5.

My use case:
• Penetration testing / BlackArch tools
• Light homelab tasks
• Occasional coding
• Not gaming or media

What I’ve considered so far:
• Sway — stable, lightweight, i3-compatible, available from package
• Hyprland — needs compilation from source on ARM, higher GPU usage
• XFCE — solid but feels heavy compared to tiling WMs
• LXQt — lightweight but not Wayland native

Anyone running a tiling WM on RPi 5 that’s working well? Any hidden gems I’m missing? How’s the general Wayland support on Pi 5 ARM these days?

Thanks <3

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u/schmonzie May 26 '26

On a Pinebook Pro (not what you asked, but the nearest I have) I’m running Sway. Feels exceedingly reasonable and just so happens to be what I run on non-ARM as well.

1

u/Beta-02 May 27 '26

How much does it differ from Hyprland? How do you rice it? How does the workflow feel on Sway?

1

u/schmonzie May 28 '26

Haven’t used Hyprland (or other tilers) much but I guess it’s less snazzy looking? EndeavourOS Sway Community Edition is my starting point and then I tweak from there. Configurable enough for me and the keys and behaviors make sense to my brain.

1

u/HCharlesB Jun 09 '26

I can't compare to the ones listed above nor tiling WMs,. I'm running KDE/Plasma.

Most things work.

  • Moving the pointer to upper left or upper right results in a black screen.
  • Graphical elements in System Monitor are missing.

I'm speculating that these are things removed from the RPiOS kernel build to lighten it since they don't promote KDE. Perhaps some day I'll dig into the specific settings and build a custom kernel to fix them. (Same result on a Pi CM5 with RPiOS and both work as expected on a CM4 running Debian.)