The launch of the new version of the display server watch 2.0, version in which various changes were made to the API as well as the removal of some APIs specific to mirclient and mirserver.
For those who do not know Mir, they should know that this is a graphical server that is developed by Canonical and that now this project is positioned as an excellent solution for embedded devices and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Mir can be used as a composite server for Wayland, allowing you to run any Wayland-based application (for example, built with GTK3 / 4, Qt5, or SDL2) in Mir-based environments.
Main novelties of Mir 2.0
This new version of the server despite being a branch jump from 1.x to 2.x does not contain a large number of changes as we might expect, but this jump is significant change in the version number due to API changes breaking compatibility and removal of some APIs obsolete.
En particular, support for specific mirclient and mirserver APIs has been discontinued, instead of which it has been proposed to use the Wayland protocol for a long time. The libraries associated with mirclient and mirserver have been preserved, but they are now used for internal purposes only, do not provide header files, and do not guarantee ABI preservation (large code cleanup planned in future).
End of support for these APIs is in line with the UBports project, which continues to use mirclient on Ubuntu Touch. It was decided that at this time the capabilities of Mir 1.x are sufficient for the needs of UBports, and in the future the project may migrate to Mir 2.0.
Removing mirclient also removed support for some of the GUIs which were only used in the mirclient API.
Besides that comment that it is observed that this simplification will not lead to visible changes and will serve as a basis for improving the code to work with platforms, especially in the area of support for systems with multiple GPUs, work in headless mode and the development of tools for remote desktop access.
As part of the cleaning, the specific mesa dependencies of the mesa-kms and mesa-x11 platforms have been removed; Only gbm of dependencies remained, which made it possible to ensure that Mir would run on top of X11 on systems with NVIDIA drivers. The mesa-kms platform has been renamed to gbm-kms and mesa-x11 to gbm-x11.
As well a new rpi-dispmanx platform has been added, allowing Mir to be used on Raspberry Pi 3 boards with Broadcom drivers.
In the cape LOOK AT (Mir Abstraction Layer), which can be used to prevent direct access to the Mir server and abstraction of access to the ABI through the libmiral library, added the ability to enable or disable server-side window decoration (SSD), as well as the ability to configure the scale in the DisplayConfiguration block.
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How to install Mir on Ubuntu and derivatives?
The installation packages of this new version are prepared for Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 and 20.10 (PPA) and Fedora 30,31 and 32.
For those who are interested in being able to install this graphic server on their systems, all they have to do is open a terminal on their systems (they can do it with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T or with Ctrl + T) and in it we are going to type the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mir-team/release sudo apt-get update
With this, the repository is already added to your system, before installing the graphical server it is fully recommended that if you are using private drivers on your system for your video card or integrated, change these to free drivers, this in order to avoid conflicts.
Once we are sure that we have the free drivers activated, we can install the server by executing in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install mir
At the end you will have to restart your system so that the user session with Mir is loaded and you choose this for your session.