Mir in 2020
It is time for my annual review of progress. When I do this I’m always amazed at how recent some of the changes are and how much has changed.
Graphics platforms
Over the course of the year, we’ve restructured our graphics platforms and formalized the requirements for these platforms to work:
Mir on desktop
Mir is not yet “desktop ready”, but it has come a long way in the past year. Dozens, if not hundreds of “papercuts” have been fixed and it is now possible to use egmde as as a “proof of concept” desktop.
At the time of writing, the best experience is by installing a development branch of egmde and following a couple of articles:
snap install egmde --channel edge/pr39
Mir on phones & tablets
Mir is the compositor behind Ubuntu Touch and last year the UBports community finally managed to update from Mir 0.24 to Mir 1.2. Currently, their devices are a mix of Mir 1.2 and Mir 1.8 base but the path to Mir 2.x is now clear:
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/5228/miroil-needs-you/
Highlights over the year
| Month | Blog | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| December | Swaybg on Mir | Giving egmde a custom background |
| November | Mir 2.2.0 Release | “Display wall”, mir-kiosk based on core20, composition bypass optimization |
| October | WLCS 1.2.0 Release | More tests, builds on Alpine |
| September | Mir 2.1.0 Release | More Wayland extensions, RPi4, Confined shell can X11 apps |
| August | Ubuntu Core, GDM Spike and a confined egmde user session | Progress towards graphical users sessions on Ubuntu Core systems |
| July | Mir 2.0.0 Release | mirclient and mirserver APIs dropped, reworked graphics platforms. |
| June | Waybar on Mir | Giving egmde a custom panel |
| May | An example confined user shell | Mircade demonstrates multiple apps in a confined shell |
| April | Mir 1.8.0 Release | HiDPI support and portability |
| March | Testing on Fedora "rawhide" | Making things work right on Fedora |
| Feburary | Mir 1.7.1 Release | improvements for running X11 apps |
| January | The egmde snap, mirclient, X11 and 16.04 | When running on 16.04 the egmde snap switches from mirclient to X11 |
Highlights over the years
It is also the end of the decade, so a look back over the years…
| Year | Blog | Mir version | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Mir in 2019 | 1.6 | Internet of Things “whitepaper”, systems without a PCI bus or using Musl |
| 2018 | Mir news: 21st December 2018 | 1.1 | support for running Wayland clients on Nvidia drivers, Arch, Alpine Linux |
| 2017 | Mir: 2017 end of year review | 0.29 | https://mir-server.io/, MirAL integrated, PPAs, https://github.com/MirServer/mir, WLCS, Fedora |
| 2016 | https://ubuntu.com/blog/mir-2016-end-of-year-review | 0.25 | “preview” of the Unity8 Mir server on desktop |
