Mir 1.1 Is Releasing Soon With Experimental X11 Support & NVIDIA Binary Blob Handling

Ubuntu's Mir team will soon be releasing their Mir 1.1 display server release in the days ahead with this first post-1.0 stable update of this re-shifted project that has morphed into offering Wayland client support.

The two big ticket items for Mir 1.1 are experimental X11 (XWayland) support as well as supporting NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver.

The experimental X11 support is being pushed along by the UBports team still working on Ubuntu Touch and with this they can heave legacy X.Org applications running atop Mir similar to the XWayland support with most other Wayland compositors.

The proprietary NVIDIA driver support with Mir 1.1 is coming as they have implemented EGLStreams support within Mir, similar to what has been needed for other Wayland compositors wanting to implement NVIDIA support with the graphics giant yet not supporting GBM or the long envisioned new "Unix device memory allocation API." This NVIDIA Mir support shouldn't have any negative ramifications for all the Intel and Radeon Mir users.

Lead Mir developer Alan Griffiths shared the imminent Mir 1.1 details on discourse.ubuntu.com. Alan also relayed that the MATE desktop environment's porting to Wayland by way of MirAL is progressing. Below is a video by William Wold of the Canonical Mir team.