Wayland support advanced a lot for Mir lately

Nov 23, 2017 15:53 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Mir developer Gerry Boland reports on the community forums on the latest work done by him and his team to implement Wayland support in the Mir display server.

That's right, Canonical still has a team of developers working on the Mir display server, despite the Unity 8 development being dropped, and it looks like it's going into a different direction this time. The latest work by done Mir's devs involves basic Wayland support implementation, including mouse and keyboard inputs.

Their Wayland Conformance Suite (wlcs) implementation also allow client to connect to the server, as well as to create windows and draw into them, but there's a lot of work to be done before they achieve full Wayland support for Mir, which involves adding essential functions like copy and paste or drag and drop.

Moreover, they need to deal with sub-surface and sub-compositor support, add more window management functionality, and implement all the protocol extensions in the Wayland-protocols repository, so they're at the point where they need community's feedback to figure out a direction for Mir.

"We’re also at the place where we need to reach out to the community and ask what are the aspects of your desktop that you value most, to help us figure out a direction for Mir," said Gerry Boland. 'Below there’s a couple of topics, please have a read, and if you’ve got any thoughts on those topics, do reply. All feedback welcome."

Highly-modular or monolithic desktop

Users are asked to send their feedback on the dedicated thread, and choose between a monolithic desktop implementation where the display server, compositor, window manager, panels, docks, and desktop are all in a single process, or a highly-modular desktop one where they're all individual processes.

You can see the pros and cons of each implementation in the respective thread, where Canonical also wants your feedback on various desktop customisation and theming options you use on Ubuntu, as well as any other feature that you require for your personal computer running Ubuntu Linux.

For now, the latest Ubuntu release, Artful Aardvark (Ubuntu 17.10), uses the Wayland display server by default for Intel graphics cards, with the X.Org Server display server as a fallback for Nvidia and AMD Radeon or other configurations where Wayland isn't supported by default or at all.