Ubuntu's Roadmap Around Snappy, Phones & Mir / Unity 8

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu's Roadmap Around Snappy, Phones & Mir / Unity 8

Olli Ries of Canonical has published a blog post outlining the various client technologies being worked on for Ubuntu, their roadmap, and the plans for making Ubuntu 16.04 a grand Long Term Support release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Roadmap

[panda84]

Unity 7 and X.org will continue to be the default Desktop, but we?ll offer Unity 8 in an alternative desktop session.

So no Mir by default yet.

This is all understandable, but why making great proclamations back when it was just started?

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/06/27/mir-plans-in-13-10/

[varikonniemi]

"We have a competent and dedicated team working on this right now, and we are confident that we can ship comfortably in 13.10"

Turns out their experts are just incompetent with no clue of what effort it takes to create something like mir.

[bregma]

So no Mir by default yet.

To be fair, Mir is the default on shipping phones. It's just not the default on the desktop, because that would mean rewriting pretty much every application that uses X11 (which is pretty much all of them on a desktop). You could run X11 on top of Mir, but for what benefit other than possible instability and much higher maintenance cost?

[uid313]

Does not excite me.
I rather see Wayland, Blender 2.75a, PHP 7, Python 3.5, kernel 4.2.

[SyXbiT]

"Our ultimate goal is a fully converged Unity 8 running on top of Mir ready for the next LTS timeframe"...
"We have a competent and dedicated team working on this right now, and we are confident that we can ship comfortably in 13.10"

Hilarious.
So if you're looking for Mir on an LTS Desktop release, they will be 4 years late.
If you're looking for any release, they're at least 2 1/2 years late.

What is most amusing about this, is that they posted this on 2013-06-27, just a few weeks before the 13.10 freeze.

[r_a_trip]

To be fair, Mir is the default on shipping phones. It's just not the default on the desktop, because that would mean rewriting pretty much every application that uses X11 (which is pretty much all of them on a desktop). You could run X11 on top of Mir, but for what benefit other than possible instability and much higher maintenance cost?

Jolla was shipping Wayland on retail phones way before Canonical RTM-ed Ubuntu phone with Mir. Then there was Tizen IVI too.

Never mind that the rest of the Linux world is porting their software to be Wayland compatible and Canonical is swimming against the current with their similar, but incompatible display system.

I seriously hope they don't have the "strategy" of hoping the Ubuntu phone app ecosystem taking off, so they can stuff those apps as (anemic) replacements on their version of the desktop.

[Passso]

No default Unity 8 for 15.10 means no Mir for 16.04 LTS... that's another 2 years lost... at best!

[theghost]

Mir + Unity 8 delayed again is default DE and display server.
Who would have thought...

As always, hot fuss about reinventing the wheel, where the reinvention is broken on release and another 2 years stability releases are necessary.
After that they realize it's all not necessary to do it this way and here starts the reinvention cycle.

Welcome to Ubuntu's world.

[finalzone]

If only Canonical stuck with their promised Wayland support back to 2010... It will hardly surprising the company face serious difficulties of making display manager, a much challenging software to work on.