EGMDE: The Example Mir Desktop Environment

We've known that Mir developers have been trying to get a Mir example desktop session going in time for Ubuntu 18.04. More details on that are now coming to light as we meet the EGMDE desktop environment.

Canonical's Alan Griffiths has been working on EGMDE to demonstrate the ease of being able to write a desktop shell based on MirAL, Mir's abstraction layer. EGMDE is the renewed effort based on Mir 0.31 and MirAL 2.0. EGMDE is short for the Example Mir Desktop Environment.

No, this isn't a new desktop effort like Unity. Rather, EGMDE is just a bare-bones demonstrator for Mir/MirAL. The basic shell running off Mir amounts to just under 600 lines of code and at this point comes down to a blank screen that is launching Weston's terminal. From this lightweight example session you can then fire up Wayland programs.

Instructions for building and trying out EGMDE can be found via this post by Alan for Ubuntu and Fedora but it depends upon Mir 0.31 that is yet to be available via the package archives officially on either OS. Those wishing to check out this very lightweight implementation can find it hosted on GitHub. It looks like the functionality will be extended over time as Alan is going to be writing a series of articles on developing with Mir/MirAL.