If things work as they should, users will be able to use Mir in the next 12 months

Mar 12, 2014 23:47 GMT  ·  By

The new Mir display server developed by Canonical is still under heavy development, and it seems that the soonest Mir will arrive is with Ubuntu 16.04, which is the next LTS in line.

Soon after Mir was announced, it seemed that Canonical was really pushing for a fast release. Rumors about the integration in Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 floated around for a while, but in the end it was decided that the technology was not ready for mass deployment and the developers needed to concentrate on the Ubuntu for phones.

The truth is that Mir is already running successfully on Ubuntu for phones and tablets, but the Desktop version is a different beast and needs a lot more work due to the diversity of the hardware out there. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, provided a general timeline for the adoption of Mir as a default display server on Ubuntu systems.

“My expectation is that in the next 12 months we’ll see lots of people running Mir as the default display server and by 16.04 it will be the default and there are lot of reason why that will let us support more hardware, let us get much better performance, and let us do some great things with some of the software companies,” said Mark Shuttleworth during the keynote for the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

It’s very likely that the switch to another display server will be very smooth if the default is planned to arrive in a little over two years. This will translate into more time for Canonical to get official support from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, making the transition much easier.