Following Mir 1.0, Developers Encouraged To Target Wayland Instead Of Mir Client API

Last week Canonical developers released Mir 1.0 for the "next-generation of graphical solutions" particularly for IoT device makers. Mir lead developer Alan Griffiths published a bit of a redux today now with the 1.0 release out the door.

Highlights from Alan's Mir post-1.0 update today include:

- Canonical has updated a number of their tutorials/guides for using graphical snaps for IoT use-cases with Ubuntu Core and now catered to Mir 1.0.

- Mir 1.0 is available for now via a PPA while they are working on getting it added to Ubuntu 18.10 as a feature freeze exception. It's also available in Arch's AUR area and in Fedora 29/Rawhide. PostmarketOS developers have also managed to get Mir running on Alpine Linux.

- A call to developers: "If you’re writing a client based on libmirclient: STOP!!! Instead, write a client based on Wayland and then you can use it with Mir, wlroots, KWin, Mutter, weston, etc." While previously there was the Mir client API before their decision in early 2017 to pursue the Wayland route, now they are encouraging application developers, toolkit developers, and others to just target Wayland and from there comes the Mir support along with all of the Wayland compositors. The libmirclient library is still part of Mir 1.0, but they will be dropping this client code likely in the future.

- Mir's Wayland support makes up about 10% of the Mir code-base.

- Developers should only need to care about Mir APIs if intending to write a shell based on Mir, in which case the MirAL API will come into play.

More details can be found via discourse.ubuntu.com.