14 DAY TRIAL // Unity 8 and Mir are the technologies that are going to be the forefront of the upcoming Ubuntu releases and they are updated constantly. They are still pretty far off from a desktop implementation, but the progress made by the developers is visible.
Canonical is now focusing all their efforts to develop a stable and shippable Ubuntu Touch image for the phones that will arrive in just a few months. This means that developers are working around the clock to fix the problems and other various bugs that plague the Ubuntu for phones operating system.
In case you didn't know, Ubuntu Touch is the only platform that integrates both the Mir display server and the new Unity 8. It will take a while to see them both working on the desktop flavor, probably next year and maybe even later. The Unity 8 desktop is still pretty far off from what users will see in the future. We have a screenshot tour of what can be now experienced on the desktop, but it has very little to do with the finished product.
In any case, the Mir and Unity 8 development powers on and some of the changes and improvements made by the devs are platform agnostic. According to the leader of the Mir and Unity 8 projects, Kevin Gunn, the developers are getting ready to land the remaining header / preview customization and favorite scopes, the life cycle rework, which handles of killed apps restarts, has already landed, and the work on the bugs and enhancements around the trusted sessions for prompts within prompts is ongoing.
Also, the orientation locking should be ready soon, a number bug fixes will be implemented in order to make Mir a lot more stable, the overlay support is now being worked on, and the ABI control will be improved in order to allow for the installation of two different versions of Mir at the same time.
Once new Ubuntu touch phones are made available and after the upcoming Ubuntu 14.10 version scheduled to arrive on October 23 is released, it’s very likely that we'll see ever more changes and improvements made to these new technologies.
If you want to test Ubuntu 14.10 running Mir and Unity 8, you can download the Ubuntu Next version and give it a spin. It's just some of the phone stuff working on a desktop and it's not representative of the final desktop, but it's still interesting.