Despite persistent rumors, Mir is not dead: We’ve now tagged and released Mir 0.32.0

Last year Canonical withdrew entirely from Unity8 and dramatically reduced its investment in Mir. Both projects continued with UBports (and for a while Yunit) working on Unity8 and Canonical continuing with Mir but focusing its efforts on IoT which had previously had to compete for attention with phone and desktop.

With Mir 0.32 we’ve reached a point where our Wayland support and, importantly, support in toolkits is reaching and exceeding par with the support for the legacy Mir client API. While there are still a few features (e.g. screencasting) that can only be accessed by the legacy Mir client API they don’t affect most clients and for IoT uses Wayland is the approach we have documented and recommend.

The significant changes

Much improved Wayland support: copy/cut/paste and subsurfaces have been implemented and many bugs fixed. logind support: this is needed for desktop shell developers using Mir. In particular this is the last puzzle piece needed by UBports to get the Unity8 desktop working on Ubuntu 18.04LTS. MirAL now supports launching Wayland clients and using Wayland within a Mir based shell.

The full changelog is below.

Getting Mir 0.32

Mir 0.32.0 is in the mir-team/release PPA for Ubuntu 16.04, 17.10 & 18.04:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mir-team/release

The release tarball is here

This release isn’t being pushed to the Ubuntu archives yet as there’s a blocking problem on 18.10. Expect 0.32.1 in the near future. We will, however be updating the mir-kiosk snap.

Using Mir 0.32

Mir is a set of libraries, not an end-user application. However, there is an example project egmde that can be used to try it out (this works best on Ubuntu 18.04 or 17.10):

Full Mir 0.32.0 changelog