Mir 0.25 Released: Pointer Confinement, Gamma KMS Support, Libmircore

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mir 0.25 Released: Pointer Confinement, Gamma KMS Support, Libmircore

For anyone hoping this year that Canonical would have decided to abandon their Mir display server efforts and shift focus back to Wayland, that did not happen, but in the stockings this holiday for Ubuntu users is an updated Mir display server release, version 0.25...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-0.25-Released

[pal666]

wayland is already in released fedora. mir which was supposed to be released earlier than wayland, is hoped for 18.04. lol

[shmerl]

So, how long it is until Mir will become a Wayland compositor?

[Geopirate]

Well if they are able to get on board with whatever the GBM replacement is going to be and help move that forward, they may have a shot. They will probably also need deal with the driver situation. If they are able to use Wayland drivers they will have a much easier time of things, but if they do that, it will be half way to just making it a Wayland compositor.

Considering their primary initial reason was getting this out the door before Wayland they are really losing steam there. They need this to be the default in really 17.04 but absolutely 17.10 or they won't be able to push it as the default for 18.04. They don't want to lose the enterprise clients that they DO have by delivering something rough, even for them. They would also need to absolutely need to work out the previously mentioned driver situation by this time next year.

[Cerberus]

Well if they are able to get on board with whatever the GBM replacement is going to be and help move that forward, they may have a shot. They will probably also need deal with the driver situation. If they are able to use Wayland drivers they will have a much easier time of things, but if they do that, it will be half way to just making it a Wayland compositor.

Considering their primary initial reason was getting this out the door before Wayland they are really losing steam there. They need this to be the default in really 17.04 but absolutely 17.10 or they won't be able to push it as the default for 18.04. They don't want to lose the enterprise clients that they DO have by delivering something rough, even for them. They would also need to absolutely need to work out the previously mentioned driver situation by this time next year.

Drivers should not be a problem, Ubuntu is too large to be ignored by graphic card manufacturers, as for enterprise clients I doubt they will force Unity 8 and Mir on them if it does not have feature parity with Unity 7 and X.org, in fact I doubt they would force it at all, in all likeness users would get Unity 8 on Mir and Unity 7 on X.org preinstalled and would be able to choose if Unity 8 and Mir are not fully ready for enterprise customers. I think competition is good for Linux, for example when Canonical began pushing their snap packages and made them compatible with other distributions, only then flatpak gained more widespread public attention, before that I didnt even know flatpak exists and I am regularly visiting Linux portals, they simply never reached out and made their project known to wider audience. Existence of two new formats will make them compete with each other and that will accelerate development, when only one format exists for something then developers have no pressure to develop more features, this way both will be pushed to compete and end users can benefit from that.

[ssokolow]

Drivers should not be a problem, Ubuntu is too large to be ignored by graphic card manufacturers, as for enterprise clients I doubt they will force Unity 8 and Mir on them if it does not have feature parity with Unity 7 and X.org, in fact I doubt they would force it at all, in all likeness users would get Unity 8 on Mir and Unity 7 on X.org preinstalled and would be able to choose if Unity 8 and Mir are not fully ready for enterprise customers. I think competition is good for Linux, for example when Canonical began pushing their snap packages and made them compatible with other distributions, only then flatpak gained more widespread public attention, before that I didnt even know flatpak exists and I am regularly visiting Linux portals, they simply never reached out and made their project known to wider audience. Existence of two new formats will make them compete with each other and that will accelerate development, when only one format exists for something then developers have no pressure to develop more features, this way both will be pushed to compete and end users can benefit from that.

...or, one could point to DEB and RPM and argue that competing systems only hurt Linux.

[Sonadow]

In theory, if I do not want Mir on Ubuntu, I just need to rebuild an upstream copy of Xserver to enable xwayland, then build an upstream copy of libdrm and Mesa, right? Since Canonical is still pulling in Wayland from Debian.

[Cerberus]

...or, one could point to DEB and RPM and argue that competing systems only hurt Linux.

And how did that hurt Linux at all? All major software vendors tend to offer their software in both deb and rpm. As for package maintainers well repacking isnt that difficult, library dependencies are a much bigger problem than deb and rpm. Multiple desktop environments are not hurting Linux? Every day a new one appears, many of them buggy and not well maintained. Why is diversity in Linux good for one thing and bad for the other thing? As proven in other "markets" competition is good for the end user.

[Cerberus]

In theory, if I do not want Mir on Ubuntu, I just need to rebuild an upstream copy of Xserver to enable xwayland, then build an upstream copy of libdrm and Mesa, right? Since Canonical is still pulling in Wayland from Debian.

I dont think you need to rebuild anything, Wayland is present in Ubuntu repositories, Canonical wont ban non Mir software from their repositories, that would cause a lot of nerd rage and it doesnt make sense to do it because some people will want X.org and Wayland, they want *buntu family to continue, that means having Wayland working on Ubuntu.

[bregma]

In theory, if I do not want Mir on Ubuntu, I just need to rebuild an upstream copy of Xserver to enable xwayland, then build an upstream copy of libdrm and Mesa, right? Since Canonical is still pulling in Wayland from Debian.

You don't have to rebuild x.org to get xwayland, you just have to install the officially supported binary package from the archive -- it gets pulled in if you install one of the Gnome-based desktops already.

Don't worry, no one is going to force you to use Mir (obviously, since it's been shipping Ubuntu for several releases already). You're offered the choice. Some people welcome choice, and others condemn it; the latter folk tend to be very vocal here.