Mir/Ubuntu Developer Talks Up Mir Outside Of Unity 8

Most talk these days of Ubuntu's Unity 8 next-gen desktop experience and their Mir display server goes hand-in-hand since the change-over is planned in-step before Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, but there's a new Ubuntu Insights blog post up working to promote Mir as more than just tech for the Unity 8 desktop.

Canonical engineer Alan Griffith has written a blog post today about Mir outside of Unity 8. Mir's abstraction layer is providing libmiral.so as a stable library to Mir providing window manager, the miral-shell providing both traditional and tiling window manager, and miral-kiosk as a sample "kiosk" with basic window management.

There hasn't been too much talk of Mir's kiosk mode up until now although Mir developer Kevin Gunn has been blogging a bit about its recent development. It will be interesting to see what comes of this Mir kiosk mode, assuming that some Canonical customers must at least be looking at something around it.

While there has been work on these Mir abstraction layers, so far no other major desktop environments (e.g. KDE, GNOME, LXQt, Enlightenment) have yet expressed plans to provide native Mir support while they have been pursuing Wayland as the successor to X11.

The rest of this blog post is basically talking up how X11 is insecure while Mir aims for greater security and also acknowledging Wayland as another effort to succeed the X Windows System.