Mir in 2019
When you’re working on a project changes happen all the time and progress can seem slow. But looking back over the past year I see we’ve achieved a lot. For example, It feels like I’ve been using mir-kiosk running in my desktop environment to test snapped “kiosk apps” forever. But really, that is the culmination of several strands of work over the past year.
Here’s what I found looking back:
| Month | Blog | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| January | Mir-test-tools as a snap | Our mir-test-tools package in the archive has been used principally for device “bringup”. By packaging these same tools as a snap we enabled test automation in Canonical’s testing lab. |
| Feburary | Mir 1.1.1 Release | Fixes for PostmarketOS, Nvidia support and Mali graphics |
| March | Mir Release 1.1.2 | Fixes for systems without a PCI bus or using Musl (instead of glibc) |
| Mir News 1st March 2019 | The mir-kiosk snap runs on Ubuntu classic | |
| Managing Mir snaps | Our collection of Mir snaps is automatically updated in the store | |
| WPE WebKit for Mir Kiosk | A community “kiosk snap” based on the WPE WebKit backend | |
| MATE Desktop Environment on Wayland | mate-wayland live on the snap store | |
| April | Mir on the GPD Pocket 2 | Mir on the GDP Pocket 2 |
| Performance tracing Mir with LTTNG | Getting performance metrics from Mir | |
| May | Mir 1.2.0 Release | Initial support for shells needing “bespoke” Wayland extensions |
| WLCS 1.0 release! | The WayLand Conformance Suite | |
| A couple of snap updates | Some changes to snapd, mir-test-tools snap and egmde-confined-desktop enabled running these snaps in user sessions | |
| Performance testing Mir with bpftrace and wayland-debug | Getting performance metrics from Mir | |
| June | Static Display Configuration for Mir | Static Display Configuration for Mir |
| Configuring mir-kiosk: a masterclass | Documenting how to (re)configure the mir-kiosk snap | |
| HOWTO: Run your IoT GUI on your desktop | Testing kiosk snaps in a traditional desktop environment | |
| July | Mir 1.3.0 Release | This completed the support for shells needing “bespoke” Wayland extensions |
| Developing Wayland extension protocols for Mir servers | A worked example of adding Wayland extensions to Mir | |
| Support for shell components landed in Mir | Support for shell components landed in Mir | |
| The egmde snap on 16.04 | The egmde snap now works on 16.04 (by using the mirclient support) | |
| August | Mir 1.4.0 Release | Support for Sway’s layer-shell extension protocol, Mir now defaults (at runtime) to not providing mirclient API support |
| WLCS 1.1.0 Release | Fixes for non-Ubuntu builds, more and better tests | |
| Running mir-kiosk on your desktop | It becomes possible to run mir-kiosk within a traditional desktop environment | |
| Mir makes it easy | Some utilities to make kiosk snap development simpler | |
| September | Porting MATE Apps to Wayland | Notes for anyone porting shell components that use X11 to Wayland |
| October | Mir 1.5.0 Release | Mir works in a confined snap without “plugging” the legacy “mir interface”, assorted fixes and enhancements |
| Mir graphics support | A reference covering Mir support different graphics stacks | |
| Build smart display devices with Mir: fast to production, secure, open-source | A whitepaper about using Mir for the Internet of Things | |
| December | Mir 1.6.0 Release | A new “wayland” graphics platform makes it possible to run Mir as a Wayland client |
Highlights
We’ve make it much easier to create “kiosk apps” based around mir-kiosk
We’ve created and released our WayLand Conformance Suite.
We’ve done what we can to ensure this is usable for other Wayland compositors and on other distros.