14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is building its own display server, Mir, and the developers are making great progress with it, but the success of this new technology will depend on the support provided by NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.
Ever since the Mir announcement made by Canonical last year, the community has met the decision with some resistance. The Ubuntu developers have explained on numerous occasions why they chose this path for their systems and it all has to do with control.
Canonical is expanding its reach into the mobile and tablet world, but it's not that easy to build something from the ground up, especially when you don't control some of the most important aspects of it, and the display server is a very important part.
The company had just two choices. One was to invest time and energy into another project like the X server or Wayland, and the second one was to build their own solution.
It might seem the sensible thing to use something that has already developed to some extent, but there are some issues with this approach. Let’s say that Canonical wants a certain functionality for their operating system, so they make a patch for Wayland or X and submit it. The other developers might accept the patch or not, depending on what their future plans for their software are. This would undermine Canonical's efforts in that regard, leaving them in the wind with their own devices.
If you build your own display server, things become a lot easier and clearer. You only implement the stuff you need and want, and the projects based on it will benefit entirely.
The problem with the second approach for the display server is that, on the desktop, you will also need the support for NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel to actually make things work. Right now, only the open source drivers provide support for Mir, but those drivers are no good when it comes to games, for example.
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has reiterated that Canonical is working with NVIDIA and AMD to ensure the support for their display server, although he didn't provide any kind of time frame for this.
Canonical wants to ship Mir as the default display server on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is almost two years from now. It's more than enough time for the companies that make the GPUs to finally implement Wayland and Mir support into their drivers, but it's going to be an interesting race.
You can see Mark's comments on the matter in the video below.
[YOUTUBE=http://youtu.be/JtzQGPH7NGw?t=48m26s]