It's Still A Slow Process For Ubuntu Touch Moving To Mir 1.x / Wayland

Given yesterday's release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-7, you might be curious how this UBports project is moving along with their adoption of the modern Mir 1.x that provides Wayland support... Unfortunately, it will still be a while before that is being shipped in production on Ubuntu Touch.

With Mir 1.x there is now Wayland client support, Canonical encourages application/toolkit developers to target Wayland APIs rather than Mir, there is EGLStreams KMS support for NVIDIA, and other new features. But in the case of Ubuntu Touch, it's still using dated Mir display server code from the days of Canonical pursuing Unity 8 + Mir + convergence when they were not pursuing any Wayland support.

During this week's Ubuntu Touch Q+A 42, they provided an updated on Mir 1.x efforts: "How is Mir 1.X coming along? Marius has been working with it. Wayland is working well although for some strange reason Qualcomm devices are not playing. It provides much faster app startup. The results will be in the Edge channel soon but that is still quite a long way off from integrating into everyday Ubuntu Touch. We will not be moving straight to Wayland in next stage of integration."

It's great to hear that Mir 1.x work will lead to faster application start-ups on Ubuntu Touch and may soon be in their Edge (testing) channel, but unfortunate that it will be a while before being part of their official stack. Separately but on the plus side for this community-driven Ubuntu phone/tablet effort, the new libhybris in Ubuntu Touch will allow for more easily porting the OS to more Android devices, the Morph browser is continuing to be improved, a new Telegram app is on the way, and other progress being made.