Trying Out Unity 8 + Mir On Ubuntu 17.04

The alt-tab application switcher with Unity 8 is nice.

The screen locker for Unity 8 was interesting and still shows the icons on the left side of the screen even though they are not accessible until unlocking the session.

For what was working, the Unity 8 desktop was actually running fine and not a bad experience at all -- I genuinely thought it was nice, for the portions without problems. The experience was much better than the last time I tried Unity 8 on the desktop some months ago. However, with all of the current bugs and limitations, it still clearly shows that more work is needed. From the initial woes of hitting the screenshot causing havoc on the session and the 4K/RX470 combination at least not working out, to many applications not launching currently.

For those wondering about benchmarks, when trying to launch Steam in the current Unity 8 session, it wasn't working due to the XMir bits not being ready.

It will be interesting to see if all these issues can be ironed out during the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle. The most recent communications from Canonical still indicate they hope to have Ubuntu 18.04 LTS using Unity 8 by default and for that to happen they really need things ironed out by 17.10. The developers are also aiming to have Mir 1.0 out early into the 17.10 cycle. For reference, it's been 4+ years now they have been developing Mir and Unity 8.

Stay tuned for more coverage as Unity 8 / Mir 1.0 nears and the eventual Wayland/X.Org/Mir Linux gaming benchmarks, better screenshots when that is working properly, etc.