Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, the Ubuntu Online Summit takes place right now, where a lot of aspects regarding the future Ubuntu releases are being discussed.
Mark Shuttleworth has announced yesterday that the codename of Ubuntu 15.10 will be Wily Werewolf and that a new Ubuntu phone will get released this year.
Today, Mark has announced that they will let the community decide whether the default will be Unity 8 and Mir or Unity 7 and X.org, for Ubuntu 16.04:
“Unity 8 will be an option for 16.04 and we’ll let the community decide the default for 16.04,”
In order to get closer to convergence, Canonical decided to create its own display server called Mir and developed Unity 8 to run over Mir, currently used by default only on Ubuntu Touch and the Ubuntu Desktop Next.
But most likely, Unity 8 and Mir will not be ready for desktop until the release of Ubuntu 16.04. Now, Mir does not have support for proprietary GPU drivers from Nvidia and AMD, only the open-source ones being officially supported so this is still an issue.
However, Unity 8 and Mir will be still available for the Ubuntu Desktop Next version, which will also adopt the Snappy packages over debs.