Canonical expects Mir to be standard in Ubuntu in 2016

It’s not until Ubuntu 16.04 that Mir will be the operating system’s default display server, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth expects. It therefore seems that Canonical finds its replacement for X.org Server far from being stable enough for all users.

Canonical announced Mir in early 2013 and initially planned to enable the display server by default in Ubuntu 13.10. However, that plan fell through because there were too many technical problems and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS also had to do without Mir as the default display server. The LTS is a “conservative” release with long-term support, making that choice an obvious one.

Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth, the driving force behind Ubuntu, has now revealed during the virtual 14.03 Ubuntu Developer Summit that Mir will not be enabled by default in Ubuntu next year either. He does think that many users will activate it themselves. “My expectation is that in the next 12 months you’re going to see a lot of people running Mir as their default display server,” he said, adding that “by 16.04 it will be the default display server.”

The reason, he says, is that Ubuntu can continue to support more hardware and offer better performance, while it would also be good for cooperation with software partners. Mir suffered from performance issues in earlier stages, and there were also issues related to Xmir, the compatibility layer that should allow existing applications to run on Mir. Mir is Canonical’s intended successor to X.org, which still contains thirty-year-old code and therefore suffers from security problems, for example.