Canonical's Kevin Gunn has sent in his weekly report on the work done by the Ubuntu developers on the Unity 8, Mir, and LXC for Xapps technologies for the Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Desktop Next operating systems.

We'll start with the next-generation Unity 8 user interface, as it has received much-needed fixes for issues with the shell rotation lock screen, as well as with the blurry screenshot in the spread. There's also a patch for the a CPU consumption issues related to keyboard focus.

According to Kevin Gunn's report, it would appear that the Unity 8 team is currently working hard on Launcher parity, which has still been stuck in the review stage for the past week or so. However, the feature might arrive sooner than you think. Moreover, some window mode bugs are being patched as we speak.

Lastly, some work has been done on the anticipated inline media playback integration with media hub, as well as social media features. Last week, the Unity 8 developers also joined the design team to work on some user interface improvements for windowed mode.

Here's what is new in Mir and LXC for Xapps

Besides all the nice Unity 8 enhancements, the next-generation Mir display server has received a last-minute patch for the u-s-c display blanking issue, thread sanitizer has been enabled in CI, and there's a lot of progress on the raw input event to unblock the Unity 8 user interface.

Evaluation of the Vulkan API begins, there's a lot of work on improving buffer semantics and minimizing lag, and the team has managed to create proposal documentation for moving GL out of the Mir's core. Please note that the launch of Mir 0.14 is currently stuck in the proposed stage due to various breaking tests.

Last but not least, some work has been done on the LXC for Xapps technology used for running X11 apps packaged as DEB files in a segregated sandbox on top of a Unity8/Mir infrastructure, especially for the Application Discovery Scope, Application Launch, and the installing packages by name functionality. Also, Libertine has been successfully built for Nexus 4.