Statement

Our current versions of RealVNC Viewer and RealVNC Server unfortunately will not support the RPi 5 platform out-of-the-box as a result of Raspberry Pi’s move to a default Wayland environment on Debian (Bookworm).

RealVNC has enjoyed being the remote access vendor of choice for the Raspberry Pi platform and of course we’re disappointed that the new stack precludes us from maintaining continuity there just now. It’s worth noting that RealVNC Connect will, of course, continue to work on all versions of Raspberry Pi and PiOS prior to the latest RPi 5 and Bookworm.

We value our partnership with Raspberry Pi highly and we’re broadly supportive of the roadmap items required to see us back on the platform as default remote access provider in short order. Without providing an exact committed delivery date, we are happy to say that we’ll be back up and running on RPi 5 during the first half of 2024.

More generally, we see investment in Wayland support as strategic for the future of our wider Linux base – not just Raspberry Pi – so it’s very much on our radar and you can expect more news early next year.

For now, and if you need it, we do have a full list of current platforms that we support HERE.

Update: Pi OS Bookworm compatibility

We are currently exploring compatibility of RealVNC Viewer and RealVNC Server when running Pi OS Bookworm in X11 mode, instead of Wayland (wayfire).

Note, the below applies to 64-bit versions of Pi OS Bookworm only. We are aware of an issue preventing RealVNC Server running under 32-bit versions of Pi OS Bookworm.

• Raspberry Pi 0-3: These continue to use X11 by default therefore RealVNC Connect continues to be supported.
• Raspberry Pi 4-5: This device defaults to using Wayland (wayfire) on Pi OS Bookworm, however it is possible to switch to X11 by using the command line raspi-config utility, under Advanced Options -> Wayland. Our initial testing indicates that RealVNC Connect functions as expected in this mode.