Unity 8 and Mir Are Getting Some Awesome Features for the Desktop

The developers from Canonical don't work exclusively on Ubuntu, they also have a number of other projects in the works, including the Mir display server and Unity 8.

Any Linux user knows that Ubuntu features the Unity desktop environment, which is a piece of technology developed specifically for this operating system by Canonical. For now, the current supported versions of Ubuntu all have a similar version of Unity, which has been upgraded constantly. The developers are working on a new Unity version, and it seems that they are making great progress.

The other piece of technology that is being worked on is called Mir and it's a display server that will eventually replace X, at least on Ubuntu. It's already being used on Ubuntu Touch, along with Unity 8.

Unity 8 and Mir are getting some awesome new functionalities

Canonical's Kevin Gunn is posting updates about these projects about once a month, and they are usually pretty interesting, but this latest one is really something. It seems that a lot more work has been put into the desktop, but it's easy to understand why. We are now in the middle of the development cycle for Ubuntu 15.04.

Reading through the changelog provided for Unity 8, we can see that they have improved full-shell rotation, non-full screen windowing for the desktop is being implemented, multi-monitor support is also coming along, the Welcome wizard has been migrated over to Unity 8, and the team is considering whether to use dialogs (prompts) or the current notifications system.

We wrote a piece on this very issue a while ago, and it looks like they are considering what solution will be chosen for Unity 8.

On the Mir side, things are even more interesting. Support has been implemented for hwc1.3 (hardware composer), work is being done to support external displays on Android devices, a desktop zoom feature similar with the one found on Mac OS X (Super key + the mouse scroll wheel) has been added, and Mir now supports 4K resolutions when connected to TVs.

We'll keep you apprised with more information about Mir and Unity 8, as it becomes available.