As you may know, Mir and Unity 8 are two of Canonical’s main pieces, in their work to create the first mobiled-desktop convergent system and to create the main IoT (Intenet of Things) operating system.
For now, Unity 8 and Mir are used by default on Ubuntu Touch (mobile version of Ubuntu) and Ubuntu Desktop Next (an Ubuntu system specially developed for Unity 8 and Mir), but the two will used by default on the regular desktop system also, probably starting with Ubuntu 16.04.
Kevin Gunn has announced in he mailing lists that both Unity 8 and Mir have received under the hood improvements and new features.
Unity 8:
- Continued working on some new capabilities for social media interaction in scopes (e.g. retweet, posts, comments)
- Continued working on life cycle for visibility (just porting tests of which there are many & going through review)
- Continued work on feature parity items for the launcher (wiggling on notification & download animation)
- Continued work on the remaining AP helpers and integrating into trunk, required some effort to build out some mocks
- Picked back up on some split greeter work
- Resumed the switcher iteration work towards desktop after some good design review/feedback
- Work continuing on new ubuntu shape in scope cards & new icon shapes
- Spent some time doing some performance analysis
- Foiled a couple of times in landing shell rotation (vivid+overlay freeze and other packages, going to target wily for now, sync when vivid+ thaws)
Mir:
- Continued on buffer semantic changes (that will help nested bypass), have multibuffer stream exposed out to client, now working on the server to client direction
- Working on detecting hung client applications as a helper for shells
- Coordinating with upstream on input changes we proposed
- Touch stream rewriter up for review
- Landed touch screen detection, some more mirevent2.0 clean up and touch validator
- Working through qtubuntu updates against mir for things like menu support
- Some Mir-on-X starting to land, other pieces MP’d, few more to go
- But good news, input is working as well now
- Struggling with getting End-to-end input-to-render test instituted as part of the mir project CI
- Put together a snap for mir example server, uploading to store