Miriway
A bit of history
Mir started out as a library for developing compositors in general and specifically for Unity8 (now Lomiri). While Lomiri is still an active community project, in recent years the focus for Mir has been Ubuntu Frame.
While there have been proof-of-concept examples of more complex compositors it wasn’t until last summer that I decided to revisit using Mir for a “desktop environment”. The result of this is Miriway a Mir based Wayland compositor with enough configuration options to support a range of desktop environments.
What is Miriway not?
Miriway isn’t a full featured desktop environment but it could, in principle, be used to build one.
It also isn’t fully “desktop ready” as there are quite a lot of “papercut” concerns that need to be fixed in Mir.
But it does provide a way to test Mir and other components of a desktop environment that makes these “papercuts” visible and much more likely to be fixed.
The Miriway snap
Miriway is available as a snap:
This combines Miriway with some additional desktop components (at the time of writing these are yambar, swaybg, synapse and Xwayland) to provide a (very basic) desktop environment.
sudo snap install --edge --classic miriway
After this you can select “Miriway” from the “cog menu” at login:
You don’t have to use Miriway as a snap, it can be downloaded, built and installed from github. But if you do this (or have done this in the past) beware that there are some differences in the configuration that can confuse the snap distribution.
If you have experimented with Miriway in the past, you may want to delete (or rename) the following files to avoid incompatibility with the snap:
/usr/local/etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/miriway-shell.config~/.config/miriway-shell.config
Configuring the Miriway snap
Installing the snap creates a couple of default configuration files:
$ find /etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/ -type f
/etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/yambar/config.yml
/etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/miriway-shell.config
When you start Miriway these are the configuration files that will be used unless miriway-shell.config has been overridden. For example, you can copy the default miriway-shell.config to ~/.config and modify it, the snap will then use this version. Here is the default content:
~$ cat /etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/miriway-shell.config
x11-window-title=Miriway
idle-timeout=600
app-env-amend=XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland:GDK_USE_PORTAL=none:XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Miriway:GTK_A11Y=none
shell-component=dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd DISPLAY WAYLAND_DISPLAY XDG_SESSION_TYPE XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
xwayland-path=/snap/miriway/current/usr/bin/Xwayland
ctrl-alt=t:miriway-unsnap /snap/miriway/current/usr/local/bin/miriway-terminal
shell-component=swaybg -i /usr/share/backgrounds/warty-final-ubuntu.png
shell-component=yambar --config="/etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/yambar/config.yml"
shell-component=miriway-unsnap /snap/miriway/current/usr/bin/synapse --startup
shell-meta=a:miriway-unsnap /snap/miriway/current/usr/bin/synapse
meta=Left:@dock-left
meta=Right:@dock-right
meta=Space:@toggle-maximized
meta=Home:@workspace-begin
meta=End:@workspace-end
meta=Page_Up:@workspace-up
meta=Page_Down:@workspace-down
ctrl-alt=BackSpace:@exit
The lines you are most likely to customise are the following:
ctrl-alt=t:miriway-unsnap /snap/miriway/current/usr/local/bin/miriway-terminal
shell-component=swaybg -i /usr/share/backgrounds/warty-final-ubuntu.png
shell-component=yambar --config="/etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/yambar/config.yml"
shell-component=miriway-unsnap /snap/miriway/current/usr/bin/synapse --startup
shell-meta=a:miriway-unsnap /snap/miriway/current/usr/bin/synapse
The shell-component= lines specify that swaybg, yambar and synapse (from the snap) are started as part of the shell. You can add to (or replace) these with components from your host environment. But if you do this, prefix the command with miriway-unsnap. For example, you could replace yambar with mate-panel:
shell-component=miriway-unsnap mate-panel
Similarly, shell-meta=a: gives a command to launch when Meta-A is pressed. This can also be replaced (again prefixed with miriway-unsnap):
shell-meta=a:miriway-unsnap wofi --show drun --location top_left
The future
The Miriway snap makes it easy to experiment with Mir in a desktop scenario and the Mir team has been “dogfooding” Miriway. As a result we have made some improvements and we are committed to improving this experience over the coming months.
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