Shell rotation, Scope multimedia playback, and more!

Jun 13, 2015 06:27 GMT  ·  By

After announcing last week that both the next-generation Unity 8 user interface and Mir display server of the Ubuntu Linux operating system received a massive update with numerous new features, Kevin Gunn dropped an email on June 12 informing us about an exciting new update for said technologies.

Therefore, we can report today that part of the work involved in improving the Unity 8 interface was for profiling it with new tools received from Canonical's hardware partners, the highly anticipated shell rotation feature, to finalize the Scope multimedia playback and to further improve the social networking features for Scopes that we've reported in last week's announcement.

Moreover, the one launcher feature parity item has been finalized, and some more improvements landed for the notification wiggling and download animation, the Slim greeter has been integrated with the liblightdm library to bring multiuser support, Switcher received more improvements and it is almost ready for the Ubuntu Desktop, and more improvements landed for the new icon shapes and Scope cards.

Here's what is new in Mir

The Mir display server of Ubuntu received semantic buffer changes that will make sure nested bypass is on track and exposes the multibuffer stream to clients, there's some work on improving dynamic double buffering, the glmark2 package received an update, and Mir-on-X got more improvements.

Lastly, there was a lot of work involved in improving detection of hung client apps, menu support, end-to-end input-to-render test, as well as some security-related stuff for the Mir Snap. All these and more are landing soon in the Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Desktop Next operating system from Canonical.