Canonical's Plans For Unity 8 & Mir In Ubuntu 15.04

Kevin Gunn of Canonical laid out some of Canonical's plans for Unity 8 and Mir for the Ubuntu 15.04 development cycle.

In a 25 minute presentation today during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, Gunn covered the Unity 8 / Mir accomplishments of the Ubuntu 14.10 cycle and then focused on work they plan to do over the next six months for Ubuntu 15.04.

Among the upcoming focus for Mir in Ubuntu 15.04 is GTK+3 support for Mir and they also plan to support libinput! The libinput library has been used by Wayland clients up to now for unified input handling and there's optional support for an X.Org input driver for using libinput there too. Canonical now seems interested in using libinput too, which will be supported alongside Android's input stack.

Here's the notes for the Ubuntu 15.04 Unity 8 / Mir action items:

Unity 8:

- Shell rotation
- Dash 3.0 updates
- Proper prompts
- Improved testing

Mir:

- Mir support for GTK port
- Fence sync improvements on client side rendering
- Integrating libinput alongside Android Input support
- Working on window management and Unity 8 non-full screen windowing elements
- Working on integrating rootless X window into Unity 8 / Qt Mir
- Refactoring Unity-System-Compositor

Ubuntu 15.04 on the desktop will still use Unity 7 with Mir. It's looking like Unity 8 with Mir won't be the default on the desktop until Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.