One of the primary goals of the makers of Raspbian/RaspiOS was that any image released today will work on any Pi model released up to this point in time (including all the Zeros and Pi1s and so on). I.e., it will work on any/all extant models; it, of course, might not work on a future model.A microSD for a Pi 4B should work in a Pi 3B+ they are both 64 bit CPUs.
But I've noticed that lately they seem to be doing some customization at install time, so that if the installer sees, say, a Pi5, it will make the image take advantage of the Pi5. This, then, could make that disk (SD card) either not work at all or not work optimally on an earlier model. So, it sounds like they may have strayed a bit from the original ideal.
For one thing (and this is actually relevant to this thread and to this OP), I think current RaspiOS releases go with "Wayland" for Pi4 or later, but just use normal X for earlier models. So, a disk setup for Pi4 might try to run Wayland if booted on a Pi3. I think this will still work, but won't be ideal.
Statistics: Posted by BigRedMailbox — Sun Jan 12, 2025 2:21 pm