updates on Unity & Mir for Ubuntu 14.04

[Oliver Ries]

(the awkward self-follow up to fix a missing subject, mea culpa)

Hi,

my name is Olli Ries and I am the Director in charge of Mir, Unity and
other things here at Canonical. I wanted to update you on some revised
directions regarding our display stack for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

In June I informed you of our plans to implement XMir (a X server
integration on top of Mir) as default in 13.10 and 14.04, given that
quality criteria are met. For Ubuntu 13.10 we decided to not pursue XMir as
default due to outstanding issues specifically around the multi-monitor
experience.

Following Mark’s vUDS keynote from Tuesday, I wanted to provide more
clarity for Ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 on the Desktop will sport Unity 7 as
the default desktop with ongoing quality improvements as the key focus.
This will be powered by a traditional X.org based display stack.

We are also working on providing a Unity 8 preview session as an option,
which we aim to have running on Mir. Stephen Webb’s team is dedicated to
bringing features that are only available on the Ubuntu for phone images to
this Unity 8 session on your desktop, for example the set of core
applications.

Mir and XMir continue to be available in the Ubuntu archives and can be
installed as opt-in in Ubuntu 14.04 for desktops. This is important for
developers who desire to start developing on top of Mir, e.g. for tool kit
support.

Mir continues to ship on the Ubuntu for phones images as the default
display server.

The revised plan is based on feedback from our community, flavors and
commercial partners and we feel this is the right decision in favor of
delivering a mature Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release that will be the base for
millions of deployments across the globe.

Going forward we are expecting to see Mir being part of the default display
stack in 14.10 and following releases, where the key focus is to bring the
vision of convergence to our users. The received feedback puts us in a
strong position to align with our partners on our shared goal of providing
the next generation of user experience on top of Mir.

best regards,
Olli
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