Canonical Announces Mir: A New Display Server Not On X11 Or Wayland

An anonymous reader writes "On the Ubuntu Wiki is now the Mir specification, which is a next-generation display server not based on X11/X.Org or Wayland. Canonical is rolling their own display server for future releases of Ubuntu for form factors from mobile phones to the desktop. Mir is still in development but is said to support Android graphics drivers, open-source Linux graphics drivers, and they're pressuring hardware vendors with commercial closed-source drivers to support it too. They also said X11 apps will be compatible along with GTK3 and Qt/QML programs. Canonical isn't using X11 or Wayland with their future Unity desktop as they see many shortcomings from these existing and commonly used components."

Comments

Re:So now it's...

[kthreadd]

Licences:
        GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source
        (Boost Software License - Version 1.0)

https://launchpad.net/mir

Re:Terrible news from the Soviets at Canonical

[Anonymous Coward]

>> "I also find the name to be odd. Do they name it after a soviet space station as an indication that they are planning to take away our rights in a soviet style dictatorship?"

I'm not sure if you're trolling or just ignorant, so let me share some knowledge in case anyone takes this silliness half seriously.

The Russian word "mir" is typically used to mean "world" or "peace", depending on its usage. The term "mir" can also be used in a similar sense to the English words "village", "community" or "global". The word "mir" is actually a perfect fit with the rest of Canonical's naming structure. Ubuntu refers to community, the Unity desktop is named with an idea of many coming together to form a whole, and Mir continues this trend as the term refers to a unified group or community.

Re:Canonical swirling down to irrelevance.

[Nimey]

Also the Arch devs are entirely willing to let pacman break your system if you don't religiously keep up with the announcements on their website. If you let a system go for a few months and then run pacman without reading the last several announcements, your system has an excellent chance of being hosed in a way that requires manual tinkering.