Wow, this is interesting. Ubuntu is planning to drop X and skip over Wayland to make their own display server called Mir, optimized for low power and diverse screen sizes. They’re providing backward compatibility via a rootless X that is a client of Mir. Even more interesting to me, they’re switching from Nux/GTK+ to Qt/QML. They’re reusing the input stack from Android for mobile, and focusing on OpenGL for output.
Originally shared by Ubuntu
After extensive assessment of our options, we are building our own Display Server for #ubuntu, called Mir – see https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-March/036776.html and the spec at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec – we are also planning on porting Unity to Qt/QML to make development more efficient across our wider convergent strategy – see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec for more details
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-March/036776.html
On the same topic, Dave Airlie says “In other news Canonical are unhappy with the wheel, there will be a spec for its replacement any day now.” 🙂
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104877287288155269055/posts/H8U8XrSQGzQ
This would be more interesting if it were clear that Canonical understood how X or Wayland worked and were making this decision based on some technical merit, but its not.
Unity irritated me enough that I moved to a Mac.