Hello Linux Geeksters. New information about the Unity 8 and Mir progress has been made available. Among the newest features implemented in Unity 8 and Mir, Canonical have added an early version of copy-paste for text using Mir, while the dash layout work is still ongoing.
For those who don’t know yet, Canonical has been working a lot lately at both, Mir and Unity 8. While the two are already implemented by default on the Ubuntu Touch images, Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander and Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr still use the good old Unity 7 and the X.org system.
There were discussions on whether to implement Unity 8 and Mir as default, starting with Ubuntu 13.10 , but due to some Mir regressions, this idea has been rescheduled. Also, since Unity 8 has been created to run with Mir and Ubuntu 14.04 will be a LTS (long term stable release) version, the latest version of Unity will not be present of Ubuntu 14.04 at all.
Mark’s Shuttleworth big dream is to reach full desktop-mobile convergence somewhere between the releases of Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04 (between October 2014 and April 2015). Also worth mentioning: most likely the first smartphone with Ubuntu Touch pre-installed will be released in 2015.