Mark Shuttleworth Declares Mir A Performance Win

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has been running the Mir Display Server for the past two weeks. After doing so, he's very happy with the Mir experience in Ubuntu 13.10 at this stage in its development and already feels that it's smoother than with X. He's blogged about his experience of running Mir on Ubuntu Linux.

With it now being easy to setup Mir and run the Unity 7 desktop over XMir, the packages will be integrated into the main Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy" archive soon after its received the go-ahead from QA and the release team. Mark has been running Mir from the PPA for the past two weeks and he has the following thoughts:

- His (Intel-based) system feels "smoother" than it did pre-Mir, but there were also other non-Mir package changes that could be responsible.

- According to his top watching, Xorg and Compiz are now using less memory and fewer CPU cycles while running under Mir compared to when Xorg was banging on the hardware directly.

- "The overall impression I have is that Mir has delivered what we hoped."

- "I believe Mir will be able to evolve faster than the competition." Mark also praises the Mir API rather than going for a rigid protocol.

- "Providing Mir as an option is easy."

- "On Ubuntu, we’re committed that every desktop environment perform well with Mir, either under X or directly."

Read more in Mark's blog post.