Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may already know, Canonical has been working at lot at Mir, their own display server, which is intended to be an alternative to the good old X.org server. Initially the Ubuntu developers planed to use it as default on Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, but the idea was postponed due to some performance reasons.
Despite the fact that Mir was initially scheduled to be implemented as default on Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander, it will debut on Ubuntu 14.10.
Recently, Mir 0.1.4 has been released, coming with an OpenGL texture cache to improve the performance when multiple surface are visible, support for translucent Mir servers, and Mirout and Mirping, two performance information reporting tools, fixes for snapshotting, Unity 8 and Mir improvements on some Google Nexus devices, Mir client ABI reached v5, Mir server AMI reached v13 and other bug-fixes and performance regressions. For more information, see the official changelog.
As a reminder, Mark Shuttleworth’s big dream is to achieve full convergence between both the mobile and the desktop versions of Ubuntu as soon as possible, or at least before Microsoft reaches this. According to Mark, if everything goes as scheduled, the convergence will happen sometime between Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04.
Canonical has been working a lot at Ubuntu Touch in the last couple of months. Lately, they have introduced the new Mir stack and added haptic feedback support, fixed some hud crashes, have patched Mir to be compatible with Nexus 10′s hardware architecture, fixed some Network Manager issues, added support for Unknown calls and SMS messages and many others. A while ago, Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical has signed with their first mobile phone manufacturer, (which is not Meizu) and that they are in strong talks with 4 others.
For now, Ubuntu Touch is officially supported only on the Google Nexus smartphones and tablets. Despite the fact that the first stable version of Ubuntu Touch, based on Ubuntu 13.10, has been officially optimized to work on LG Nexus 4, it has been patched to work on all the existing Google Nexus devices: LG Nexus 4, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, except Nexus 5.