Canonical has been working on the Mir display server for some time, although most of their efforts have been made towards the mobile platform. They are now looking to optimize it for desktop use and nothing reflects the progress made more than a famous game running on Mir.

Mir is already working on the desktop, but users need to have the open source video drivers in order to make it work. Canonical has recently built a new flavor called Ubuntu Next which features Unity 8 and the Mir display server. The new desktop environment needs Mir, so it stands to reason that the updated DE will arrive for regular users when Mir is also ready. It's not there yet, but it's taking great strides.

Mir was not well received by the community and many users said that it was just doubling the efforts made by the Wayland devs. In fact, the Ubuntu developers actually supported the Wayland project for a while, but they quickly realized they needed their own solution for the mobile platform. Wayland didn't fit the bill and thus Mir was born, a new piece of open source software completely controlled by Canonical.

Dota 2 running on Mir is just the beginning

Unity 8 has been getting a lot of attention lately and it's clear that Ubuntu devs have started to focus on it. They can't do that unless they also advance Mir, and from the looks of it, it's going very well. Canonical's Brandon Schaefer, a software engineer, posted a short video of a Dota 2 game running SDL2 in Mir. It might not seem like much right now, but he also explained that he got the same frame rate as the X11 version.

"Mir is a next generation display server targeted as a replacement for the X window server system to unlock next-generation user experiences for devices ranging from Linux desktop to mobile devices powered by Ubuntu. The primary purpose of Mir is to enable the development of the next generation Unity," reads the official website.

One of the main concerns for the Ubuntu users is that the new display server won't get the same kind of support as X from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. For now, only the open source drivers have support for it, but Canonical is working with NVIDIA and AMD to ensure the fact that they will be ready to ship a functional software stack.

Mir and Unity are expected to arrive by default in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is April, 2016.