XMir update for Ubuntu 13.10

[Oliver Ries]

Hi Everyone,

As many of you will know, the Mir team had two core goals for the Ubuntu
13.10 cycle:

1. Deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 on the desktop for those cards that
supported it, and fall back to X for those that don’t.
2. Deliver a native Mir + Unity 8 running on Ubuntu Touch images and
devices.

Unfortunately, due to some outstanding technical difficulties, we can only
achieve the latter of these two goals.

While we are on track to successfully deliver Mir for Ubuntu on
smartphones, we are unfortunately not going to be able to deliver Mir +
XMir + Unity 7 as the default experience on the desktop.

Mir has made tremendous progress and is currently available on the Ubuntu
archive for use, but there are still some outstanding quality issues that
we want to resolve before we feel comfortable turning it on by default.
Many of these issues live in the XMir part of the stack, which provides the
integration between the X server and the underlying Mir system compositor.
More specifically, the multi-monitor support in XMir is working, but not to
the extend we'd like to see it for all of our users. The core of Mir is
working reliable, but with XMir being a key component for our 13.10 goals,
we didn’t want to compromise overall Ubuntu quality by shipping it.

Mir & XMir are available from the archive as an optional configuration, but
XMir won't be part of the default configuration.

I know many of you have been curious about the progress of discussions with
GPU manufacturers about Mir support, and while those conversations are
under NDA, I can assure you they are progressing forward.

We have compiled a Q&A which can be found at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/13.10/NoDefaultQ%26A

If you have any further queries, please feel free to reach out to me or my
team, and feel free to discuss this in more detail either here or on
mir-devel (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/mir-devel/).

best,
Olli
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20131001/b0f1ec88/attachment.html>