mir
A set of libraries for building Wayland-based shells with hardware abstraction and window management.
What is mir?
Mir is a set of libraries for building Wayland-based shells that abstracts hardware complexity and provides window management. It handles graphics and input hardware configuration, multi-display support, and secure client-server communications, simplifying shell development.
Shell authors and developers building custom Wayland-based desktop environments or shells who need a stable, performant platform with hardware abstraction.
Developers choose Mir for its comprehensive hardware abstraction, customizable window management, and secure communications, which reduce the complexity of building Wayland shells compared to lower-level alternatives.
Overview
The Mir compositor
Use Cases
Best For
- Building custom Wayland-based desktop shells
- Developing embedded or IoT interfaces with Wayland
- Creating secure display servers for specialized applications
- Implementing multi-display setups with touch and tablet input
- Prototyping new desktop environments with hardware abstraction
- Integrating greeters and system components into custom shells
Not Ideal For
- Projects requiring X11 compatibility or legacy application support
- Teams wanting out-of-the-box desktop environments like GNOME or KDE without development
- Simple applications that only need basic windowing without hardware abstraction
- Environments where proprietary licensing is preferred over GPL
Pros & Cons
Pros
Handles graphics and input hardware bringup, configuration, and quirks transparently, as per the README, reducing complexity for shell authors dealing with diverse hardware.
Provides customizable window management with useful default behavior via a high-level API, simplifying shell development without starting from scratch.
Ensures secure interactions, which is critical for modern display servers, as highlighted in the key features for building reliable shells.
Supports touch, mouse, tablet input, and multiple displays seamlessly, abstracting hardware differences to focus on UI development.
Cons
As a niche library for custom shells, it lacks the extensive plugin, theme, and community support of established compositors like Mutter or KWin.
Requires integration with system components like greeters and hardware configuration, which can be daunting for developers not versed in low-level graphics programming.
Hosted and maintained by Canonical, which may bias development towards Ubuntu-specific use cases, potentially limiting cross-platform flexibility or independent contributions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
imguiDear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
pencilThe Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.
NanoGUIMinimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
elementsElements C++ GUI library
Found a gem we're missing?
Open-Awesome is built by the community, for the community. Submit a project, suggest an awesome list, or help improve the catalog on GitHub.