Ubuntu's Miriway Maturing As A Mir-Based Wayland Compositor For Other Desktops

In addition to Canonical continuing to invest in developing Mir as a platform now built atop Wayland, over the past year Canonical developers have been quietly working on Miriway as a Mir-based Wayland compositor and it's becoming iteratively more useful.

Mir lead developer Alan Griffiths presented at the Ubuntu Summit last week in Latvia around Miriway and how it can be used with various desktop environment components. Miriway is intended to be used for creating Wayland-based desktop environments with Mir and its shell can handle window management policy, Wayland and X11 application support, and other basic desktop features. Alan initially announced Miriway earlier this year when the Snap became available and since that May announcement has continued building up more features and functionality.

Miriway is continuing to be developed with a desktop-agnostic approach and complementary to the Ubuntu Frame as their Wayland compositor for IoT use-cases. Miriway is still more experimental in nature and not clear that Canonical is planning any productization around it but rather as a Mir proving ground and helping to get more desktop components working atop Wayland.

Alan today posted on the Ubuntu Discourse around Mir adding a new "virtual display" platform for supporting Mir without a physical display output... Another late feature for Mir. In any event, Miriway also now supports this new platform too.

There are example Miriway configurations to get it running with LXQt, MATE and Xfce desktops. Those wanting to try out Miriway or to learn more can visit Miriway on GitHub.