Using Miriway For Empowering Xfce / MATE / LXQt & Other Desktops With Wayland

Miriway is an effort for bringing Wayland to desktops not currently having native Wayland support and is made possible via the Canonical-developed Mir. Miriway has been a side-project of Alan Griffiths as the lead Mir developer and today he published a blog post with more details for users interested in making use of it.

Miriway has been an ongoing effort by Griffiths as a Mir-based Wayland compositor for other desktops with example configurations for the likes of LXQt, MATE, Sway, and Xfce. Miriway is distributed as Snaps besides the source code being available, so for those wanting an easy deployment process it basically means running Ubuntu Linux or an otherwise Snap-supported environment.

Griffiths describes Miriway as:

"Miriway itself is a small (800 lines of code) Wayland compositor built using Mir. Mir is much bigger (100,000 lines of code), but as it is supported by Canonical as part of commercial offerings such as Ubuntu Frame there are resources committed to maintaining it.

Miriway is being used by the Mir team to showcase, test and “dogfood” Mir. This means we are noticing and fixing bugs in Mir that affect its use in Miriway.

It is possible to use Miriway “as is”, contribute to it (it is GPL3, with no CLA), or fork it. (I would welcome contributions that make it better.) For example, The Mir APIs used by Miriway are intended to make customization of window management easy (there is a “proof of concept” tiling window manager in the Mir “examples” code that could be easily improved on and integrated as an option into Miriway)."

This Ubuntu Discourse post published today outlines the how-to steps for testing Miriway out. Currently working with Miriway across desktops is configurable keybindings, floating window management, workspaces, Wayland extensions that are supported by Mir, on-screen keyboards, remote desktop with the likes of WayVNC, and hybrid graphics support. But there isn't yet any animations or transitions with windows and no integration with portals.