Canonical Is Hiring Graphics Stack Developers To Work On Mir

While it was only months ago that Canonical let go of several Mir developers at the same time as other staff reductions for the Unity team and different areas as the company changed their focus, they are now looking for new Mir hires.

Canonical is looking to hire "engineers with experience and passion" with a focus of getting Mir onto "desktops of the future and all IoT devices."

Canonical is pursuing Linux graphics stack veterans with 5+ years experience, C++ is Mir's dominant language, OpenGL/graphics experience, experience with Wayland, and related skills. The job posting can be found here.

When Canonical dropped their Unity 8 convergence plans earlier this year and sacked some of the original Mir developers, they talked of continuing to maintain Mir for IoT use-cases. Since then they've added basic Wayland client support to Mir. There's also been some smaller desktop environments like MATE expressing interest in potentially using Mir as their Wayland compositor due to the quicker bringup and UBports also remains interested in Mir. With Ubuntu 17.10 using GNOME Shell by default, they are using the stock Mutter Wayland compositor.

With Canonical now hiring for the Mir team and bringing back talk of everything from future desktops to IoT and "[unlocking] next-generation user experiences", it will be interesting to see where they will be trying to push Mir as we move into 2018.

Earlier this month is also when they punted Mir to GitHub in hopes of encouraging more community contributions and they have been working on getting Mir to run on non-Ubuntu distributions like Fedora.