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 and LabWC compositors, as shipped with the Raspberry Pi Desktop OS based on Debian 12 in 2023 (Wayfire) and Debian 13 in 2025 (LabWC).

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 in Wayfire it blurs (and fails to enlarge the mouse pointer), and in both Wayfire and LabWC 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.

Permanent desktop scaling

In LabWC on Raspberry Pi OS 13, use Preferences---Control Centre---Theme and increase Font size: this now controls the entire desktop.

To get the same effect in Wayfire on Raspberry Pi OS 12, edit ~/.config/wayfire.ini and add a line like scale = 1.5 to an [output] section (e.g. [output:HDMI]---just create a section called [output] if none are there). 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.
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.

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