GTK+ Lands Experimental Backend For Mir Display Server

GTK+ apps now run not only on X11 and Wayland under Linux with native support but the mainline GTK+ Git code now also supports running Ubuntu's Mir Display Server. That's right, there's now mainline Mir support in GTK for the GNOME/GTK 3.16 release.

Beyond many GTK+ 3.16 improvements that already landed, Canonical's Robert Ancell has been leading work on mainlining the GTK+ Mir support capabilities. As of yesterday in Git, that work is now in Git for GTK+ 3.16 and all of the GTK+ 3.15.x development releases ahead.

The Mir support comes down to almost 5,000 lines of new code but is still considered experimental and comes disabled by default. Enabling the Mir support requires re-building GTK+ Git with the --enable-mir-backend switch.

It's quite interesting the Mir backend was accepted while there's still not yet any mainline Mir support in Qt5, which is what powers Ubuntu's Unity 8.