Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, both Canonical and Red Hat have started the work at their new display servers, Mir and Wayland respectively, in order to create a viable alternative to the good old X.org server.
For now, both Mir and Wayland are under massive development, none of them being used on desktop yet. While Mir is testable via the Ubuntu Touch Next Image, Wayland will be added to the default repositories of Fedora, but will not be used as default.
At first, Canonical intended to use Red Hat’s Wayland on their Ubuntu Touch, but it was difficult for them to submit patches and customizations for the mobile device and so, they decided to do the work themselves and created Mir.
Recently, Canonical has joined the Khronos Group to contribute to the creation of Mir/Wayland drivers.
This is what Oliver Ries, the Head of Engineering Product Stategy at Canonical, said:
“Canonical has joined Khronos in order to help establish the necessary driver standard that is required for Mir (and Wayland) to succeed. We have specifically contributed to the current standard proposal/draft.”
For now, both display servers have the same problem. Only open-source graphics drivers have been made available for either Wayland and Mir, but AMD and NVIDIA announced that they will release GPU drivers with Wayland/Mir support.