Mir is a graphical server for Linux developed by Canonical in order to replace the X Window System in Ubuntu. It is based on EGL and uses part of the infrastructure originally developed for Wayland, such as Mesa's EGL implementation and Jolla's libhybris.
The compatibility layer for X, XMir, is based on XWayland, while other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include the Android input stack and Google's Protocol Buffers. Mir currently runs on a variety of Linux-powered devices, including traditional desktops, IoT, and embedded products.
Mir graphical server enables device manufacturers and desktop users to have a well defined, efficient, flexible and secure platform for their graphical environment.
Mir can be used as a composite server for Wayland, allowing you to run any application that uses Wayland in Mir based environments (eg compiled with GTK3 / GTK4, Qt5 or SDL2). The project code is written in C ++ and is distributed under the GPLv2 license.
What's new in Mir 1.7?
This new version of Mir 1.7 It comes shortly after a month of the previous version, with which the work on Mir has been a bit more agile, since the response to the correction of errors has not taken longer than it should.
The new version mainly offers support related bug fixes experimental for launching X11 applications in Wayland-based environments (using Xwayland).
For X11, the ability to decorate windows was implemented and added an option to redefine the path to the Xwayland executable file.
Besides it code related to Xwayland cleaned up with which in one of the next releases, the state of the experimental function will be removed from the X11 support.
In the implementation of the platform "Wayland", which allows Mir to run as a client under the control of another Wayland composite server (this server can also be the one provided in Mir miral-system-composer), support is added for setting the output scale.
The optional ability to run applications based on the mirclient API instead of the Wayland protocol is still preserved, but already has been removed in the master branch (Previously, using UBports and Ubuntu Touch prevented the removal of the mirclient API.)
If you want to know more about it, you can consult the original publication In the following link.
How to install the Mir 1.7 graphic server in Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to install this graphic server on their systems, they should know that Mir's project is not exclusive to Canonical products, since there are some installation packages that are prepared to facilitate installation in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 19.04 (with the help of a PPA), in the same way there are packages prepared for Fedora 29, Fedora 30 and Fedora 31.
In the case for those of us who are users of a supported version of Ubuntu, we can add the proposed repository in our systems by following the instructions that we share below.
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 in your system you are using private controllers 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 choose this.