Latest version of Canonical’s Wayland compositor arrives

Canonical remains to be working away by itself Mir show server, utilized in a number of of its IoT product traces. Version 2.14 positive factors extra performance helpful for full desktop environments.

Mir is a fancy challenge which has undergone some large modifications over its greater than a decade of existence, and it has a number of subprojects now, together with the Lomiri desktop, which not solely natively runs on Debian however is included as half of Debian 12.

Mir 2.14 – that is version 14 of Mir 2, not version two-point-one-four – is out, and helps a bigger vary of Wayland performance. The announcement says this launch brings assist for Wayland screenlockers (the ext-session-lock-v1 Wayland extension protocol), and assist for Drag ‘n Drop, which additionally signifies that “attached” home windows might be “restored”” by a drag gesture. It has improved nVidia {hardware} assist, and fixes an evdev dealing with bug.

Since version 2.0, Mir has been a pure Wayland compositor, though the fondleslab version nonetheless makes use of the older Mir 1.8, as a result of that additionally helps the older mirclient APIs. In reality, it isn’t a lot a Wayland compositor; as lead developer Alan Griffiths informed The Register: “Mir is a set of libraries for building Wayland compositors.”

He went on to say: “There are a number of projects that use these libraries, the most significant being Ubuntu Frame, Lomiri and Miriway.”

However, none of these are precisely family names, so we do not blame you in any respect for those who’re not conversant in them — we weren’t. It is completely OK for those who’re not fully clear on precisely what a “Wayland compositor” is, as a result of these things shouldn’t be very well-explained by the large desktop tasks that use it. This is why the Mir docs have a bit titled “OK, so what is this Wayland thing, anyway?”, which we discovered fairly useful.

Wayland itself is a protocol, like X11 is a protocol. Different packages implement Wayland, simply as completely different ones implement X11, akin to X.org on FOSS Unix, Xsun in SPARC Solaris, or on Windows, Xming, Reflection or MI/X, amongst others.

Part of the confusion is available in with the time period “compositor”. A Wayland compositor is not identical kind of program as an X11 compositor, which because the Arch Linux wiki says is only a kind of X.org extension.

A Wayland compositor combines two capabilities that with X11 are separate packages: the show server and the window supervisor. So, a number of packages that have been “just” window managers underneath X11, akin to GNOME’s Mutter and KDE’s Kwin, have been prolonged into Wayland compositors, which means that also they are show servers in their very own proper.

Of the three tasks that Griffiths informed us about, he stated, “Ubuntu Frame is the commercial focus for Mir work.” Frame is not a window supervisor in any respect: it’s meant for standalone kiosk-type roles, the place one app controls the entire display screen on a regular basis. It’s distributed as a Snap package deal, so it should run on most distros, however a main goal is Canonical’s IoT distro Ubuntu Core.

Lomiri – previously referred to as Unity 8 – we have talked about earlier than. It’s a converged desktop and touchscreen surroundings, Griffiths stated, “which is ‘inspired by’ Unity desktop, and why Mir was needed in Debian.”

The third use of Mir was new to us, although. Miriway, he confirmed, “is a lightweight/proof-of-concept ‘desktop environment’.”

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It appears to be a unfastened successor to EGMDE, which the Mir homepage describes as:

Miriway began out as a vacation challenge, however he describes it as “somewhat usable out of the box”.

Griffiths has posted an illustration video on YouTube, of which he informed us: “Those experiments are based on building and installing the Github project locally (not the snap) and running the example-configs scripts. The same stuff works with the snap – it just needs a slightly modified config (adding miriway-unsnap as needed).”

As a take a look at the present state of the Wayland compositor ecosystem, the Arch wiki’s checklist of them reveals many are based mostly on wlroots. Rather than a compositor in its personal proper, wlroots is a set of libraries for constructing a compositor, which a number of groups have used to construct comparatively easy tiling window-manager-like environments, akin to Sway, Wayfire, dwl (which goals to be dwm for Wayland), and japokwm. Aside from GNOME and KDE, for now, most of the exercise in Wayland-land (sorry) appears to be quite simple tiling environments.

Youtube Video

For a set of instruments that we suspect many individuals thought was killed off in Ubuntu’s nice purge of 2017, Mir is livelier than you would possibly count on. As we stated just lately, it more and more appears to be like like Wayland is the long run of Linux GUIs. Mir’s inclusion in Debian, and the Lomiri, EGMDE and Miriway tasks, all represent hopeful indicators that Mir might present a foundation for one thing a bit richer than a alternative of tiling window managers. ®