Mir

In March 2013 Canonical announced that Ubuntu would not move to Wayland as promised, but build its own display server for Unity 8 and the plan to run the same interface on phone, tablet and PC. The justification included claims about flaws in Wayland's input handling that turned out to be wrong and were withdrawn, but the damage was done: the rest of the Linux world read it as Canonical preferring to rewrite everything rather than collaborate. When Intel pulled XMir support from its X driver that autumn, stating that it did not condone Canonical's chosen course, the lines were drawn.

Mir did ship on Ubuntu Phone in 2015, but the desktop never got Unity 8 by default. In April 2017 Mark Shuttleworth cancelled both Unity 8 and the convergence plan, and Ubuntu went back to GNOME on X.Org and then Wayland. The Mir team, however, was allowed to carry on. Mir 1.0 in autumn 2018 spoke the Wayland protocol, and the project lives on today as a set of libraries for building special-purpose compositors: Ubuntu Frame for kiosks and signage, and UBports' Lomiri, the Unity 8 that survived on volunteer effort.