Ubuntu developers are working hard on these new technologies

Aug 4, 2014 11:55 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu developers are constantly working on their Unity desktop environment and most of changes and new features will most definitely land in the next versions of the operating system.

Canonical has been using Unity for its Ubuntu Linux distro for a few years now and each new Ubuntu release arrives with various improvements for it. Even if not every new update seems very important, the cumulated effect of so many builds for Unity allows the environment to evolve slowly over time.

In fact, the Unity desktop that you can find today in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is quite different from the one that users had in 2011, for example. The latest major update for Unity landed in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, but it's still being worked on and a new version will land in Ubuntu 14.10 as well.

The final goal of the developers is to ship the new Unity 8, which is already available on Ubuntu for phones. The situation is a little bit more complicated because it's using the Mir display server on the phones and that technology is not yet ready to arrive on the desktop side as well.

In any case, the leader of the Unity and Mir team from Canonical, Kevin Gunn, has posted a list with the latest improvements made and it looks like they are registering some good progress.

According to the changelog, a number of QtComp bug fixes have landed, the scope customization ability has been improved, the locking greeter has been finished and will land soon, the scope overview integration with the backend has been improved, and more bug fixes that resulted from the design team's fit-n-finish sprint have been implemented.

On the Mir side, a few bugs that have been found in the recently released 5.0 version have been fixed, the developers are still working to make flipping perform as it should with the qxl driver, and a few other changes and improvements have been added.

Mark Shuttleworth says that Canonical wants to have Mir as the default display server in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is set for release in two years’ time. That's a long way to go and there is plenty of time to get everything in order until then.

The last hurdle is the support from the three main companies that provide GPUs and video solutions – NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. They need to officially support Mir through their drivers, otherwise it would be very problematic to use it.

Mir support already exists in the freeware versions of the drivers, but they don't provide the quality and the performance necessary for a smooth experience.