Mir Office Hours - 2024-05-21 15:00UTC

matthew-kosarek · May 21, 2024, 6:27pm

Meeting Notes 2024-05-21

Below I have summed up the meeting notes for this month. Please let me know if you think that anything is missing or needs revision.

@sminez introduced Penrose, including the purpose of the project and a bit on how it works. You can learn more about Penrose at the Github repo link.
@sminez is interested in using Mir as a Wayland backend for Penrose, however there are some minor X11 bits that would need to be refactored before this is possible.

@matthew-kosarek discussed how the Mir team is going to fix a number of minor issues that are affecting the desktop specifically around focus switching.
@saviq corrected the screen locking task to reflect the fact that:
1. The screen should lock when the desktop goes idle
2. The screen should go idle when we lock
@saviq added that the “stylus support” task would also greatly improve our input testing capabilities because we would have to develop absolute pointer control to properly test styluses.

@saviq stated that we would prefer using portals over protocol extensions because:
1. Portals are more widely used by clients
2. Mediation is easier used porters because there are already existing mechanisms for doing this
The “global shortcuts” portal will be our first venture into this territory.

@saviq: The Mir team is in the process of migrating all of our snaps to base core24.
@saviq: The focus of our development is now Ubuntu 24.04.
@saviq: 2.17 will be the last release that goes into jammy, and everything else will go into 24.04 and above.
@saviq: The team will be working on updating the remaining snaps in the coming weeks.

Mike Gabriel asked if QtMir had been successfully ported to Mir 2.17 yet
According to @alan_g, @raof is in the process of doing so. Some changes need to be made to the miroil library, so the update will have to wait until the 2.18 Mir release most likely.

We will decide offline (probably on the matrix channel) about a good time to meet for those of us to meet in Pacific timezones.

Mike Gabriel is in the process of removing the Mir 1.x dependencies out of Ubuntu touch.
Mike Gabriel is interested in portals as an alternative to the “trust store”
Mike Gabriel is interested in finding other people who are knowledgeable about Mir. He has funding for this, so if anyone is interested in potentially being paid to write Mir code, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Lomiri folks!
- @alan_g mentioned that the Mir team will always be available to answer questions that any consumers of Mir have.
@Conan_Kudo has been interested in bringing Ubuntu Touch to Fedora for a number of years now.
- Mike Gabriel responded that they will need to liberate Lomiri from the Unity 8 ecosystem before that can be possible.
- Mike Gabriel mentioned that there is funding for this work.
Mike Gabriel expressed that he would like to see Lomiri have a smooth transition form login manager to user session. At the moment, there is a ~2 second pause between the two states.
- Mike Gabriel and @Conan_Kudo discussed the current state of Lomiri and why the smooth transition is not working, as well as the state of SDDM in regards to Wayland support’
- @Conan_Kudo brought up the drm-lease protocol as a potential solution
- @alan_g and @saviq mentioned that plymouth allows for smooth transitions now and provided this link. Saviq also mentioned that Ubuntu frame provides this functionality.

Mike Gabriel asked if Mate could benefit from Mir
@Conan_Kudo mentioned that the biggest challenge for Mate is figuring out how to plug in a different compositor.
There is probably a path forward with Mate, however when @Conan_Kudo reached out to the developers, they showed little interest.
@Conan_Kudo said that they were considering Mir a long time ago with the mirco project.
According to Mike Gabriel, Mate was actually forked recently. The fork appears to be in this organization.