Ubuntu Announces Mir, A X.Org/Wayland Replacement

[ninez]

Google are at least honest about their intentions and their approach towards open source; they don't invent technical justifications for decisions which were made long beforehand on totally different grounds.

+1

you posted that while i was writing my reply (which also discussed 'stated intentions'). there as an article recently about Mark Shuttleworth and his intentions;

http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-an...hs-big-mistake

[asdx]

Unbelievable. Remember back in 2010 when they said they would be using Wayland?

When that announcement came around that 'they weren't using Wayland, but they were using something else' came along, I gave them too much credit, by saying the PR person was likely just mistaking "Wayland" for the reference compositor, "Weston".

But they are making their own display protocol in C++, which some people on the Wayland IRC pointed out that there are lots of stubs in their BZR repo which as ModplanMan points out, the repository was created back in June 2012, and they likely had planning and decision making to do so much earlier. So far the issues they posted in the article and wiki make no sense to the Wayland developers

And it also seems really buggy right now, and they have some issues that give them "weird errors" according to this documentation file: https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mir-te...ad:/HACKING.md .

If I remember correctly, the Wayland protocol didn't hit 1.0 (AKA the point in time when there will be no more protocol breakage) until October 2012. If they had their doubts or concerns about the Wayland protocol, they had time to bring them up on the Wayland mailing lists.

Now they are going to have to make the toolkits support their own protocol. They mention GTK and QT, but they forgot about EFL, and SDL, and the other projects that have Wayland support already. It would be interesting to see if they actually try to merge the support upstream.

And now that they are creating a new Display Server protocol, to support Ubuntu applications in another distro, there is going to have to be some kind of support for Mir in their Wayland server, on top of xwayland support.

The fragmentation this will bring is going to be TERRIBLE.

What's next, they're going to announce their own KERNEL?!

I agree with you and I'm in favor of Wayland and not this NIH/Wayland-wannabe crap that Canonical brings.

But please spell it right, it's Qt and not QT.

Thanks.

[Hamish Wilson]

unlike Mark/Canonical, Redhat was honest from the beginning (as a good example) - they have a very commercial enterprise using FOSS software, yet are heavy contributors to FOSS projects and have been for years and years. ~ Canonical is not and likely never will be either. ~ how much code does Canonical pump into the kernel? how about compilers like GCC? ...how about anything that isn't just 'self-serving'... Google does many things that benefit a wider audience, much like Redhat does...

Also, has Red Hat ever released anything under a closed source license? I know Canonical has.

[stiiixy]

Amarok and Digikam are KDE, and thus qt, apps anyway. GTK apps run fine under KDE and you can set independent themes for them. Same policy with qt. You will probably have both toolkits installed, but apps from either still work, it just means Unity is written for qt with qml.

Yes, I understand they use differant toolkits, hence why I spread it out a little to cover those bases to make my not so hidden point =D they're not really harming anyone by taking this approach. I'm just guessing people are seeing this as another Windows/OSX attempt, and it will all start with the phone company requiring stupid lockdown on their systems, and it will eventually creep back up the ecosystem, just like it has Samsung.

[zanny]

Yes, I understand they use differant toolkits, hence why I spread it out a little to cover those bases to make my not so hidden point =D they're not really harming anyone by taking this approach. I'm just guessing people are seeing this as another Windows/OSX attempt, and it will all start with the phone company requiring stupid lockdown on their systems, and it will eventually creep back up the ecosystem, just like it has Samsung.

Wait, what does this have to do with phone companies? Mir is harming the legitimacy of the GNU/Linux platform as a whole like this, because it means either gpu manufacturers support both Wayland and Mir, in addition to X (Nvidia has way too much invested in CUDA to let X support depreciate), or they just continue providing lackluster or no support at all, or they target only Mir and leave everyone else in the dirt.

The actual experience shouldn't be any different between them. The conflict is between those that write the toolkits, sdl, GUI apps using low level primitives, etc. Mir is going to be Canonical developed and not an open development and not be open to outside contribution, and if it takes off, it fucks over Linux hardcore because then driver manufacturers think supporting Mir is good enough, and we lose a decades worth of momentum in getting realistic X support (and later on Wayland).

[Sonadow]

So what happens now? The issue has finally come to a head and the entire Linux community will have to make a stand.

Push for Mir adoption, or push for Wayland adoption. Simple as that.

Simply put, this is one situation where we cannot have both since they are in direct competition with each other, especially when it's something that is fundamental to a working desktop Linux installation. AMD and Nvidia are not going to release different copies of their binary driver for Mir and Wayland seperately (or even bother to support both in one single package), and nobody wants to have to deal with downloading non repo-packaged software from a website only to be greeted with the following choice:

Download Application ABC for
- X
- Wayland
- Mir

Not to mention that this is going to be hell for people who like / prefer to compile their software from source. If Mir gets favoured by the upstream software developers, it will take lots of ugly hacks to get it compiled under Wayland. Same for the opposite if Wayland is favoured: the presence of Mir in Ubuntu means that ugly hacks have to be made to get the program compiled in a Mir environment.

Personally I'm all for Ubuntu dying in a fire since they have single-handedly managed to fracture the critical low-level landscape in Linux by this announcement now that Wayland has been under development for more than 5 years. And when one takes into consideration that Ubuntu seems to be dead set of implementing their own Ubuntu-centric patches into Qt just to make it compatible with Mir, I think it's time we show them the door.

[Sonadow]

That said, I have no issues with using Mir as long as everyone gets behind it. And by EVERYONE i don't mean just Ubuntu and the Ubuntu-based distros, but Arch, Gentoo, Slackware and all the major RPM-based distributions (Red Hat, Fedora, Mageia and OpenSUSE especially).

Traction and momentum only comes with enough people adopt it. If Mir wants to earn the position as the de facto display server on desktop Linux those aforementioned distributions must adopt it as well, because only then will the smaller distros follow suit.

If Mir can win over the big 10, its status as a de facto display server is assured.

[TemplarGR]

Ubuntu is dead anyway. It seems the easy money of Mark Shuttleworth have made him lose all management skills. He obviously couldn't manage a grocery store, let alone drive Canonical to become the next Apple...

Canonical has been making stupid decisions for many years. Some of us could see it back then, but most took their time... Now it is obvious to everyone but the paid trolls and the fanbois...

Let me put it simply: There is absolutely no way Canonical can create their own ecosystem. They lack the resources, they lack the community, they lack the weight. They can try, but they will fail miserably.

But this is good for us in order to receive a lesson for FOSS: Sometimes freedom is more important than convenience, and that includes software too... The next time someone complains that all of us Opensource supporters are not pragmatic enough, slap them with this news in the face...

And another thing, about Unity: Remember when they said that it is an "improvement" for the desktop? And how all the fanbois supported this "fact"? Well it is obvious now that they designed it with Tablets and Phones in mind. The emperor has no clothes, folks.... At least now you see...

Let me make a prediction: Ubuntu on Phones/Tablets will fail obviously, and then Canonical will try to focus again on the desktop, only to find out that their loyal userbase has shrunk considerably... I believe even Linux Mint will go Debian-only eventually... Linux Mint will become the next Ubuntu...

[Sonadow]

Ubuntu is dead anyway. It seems the easy money of Mark Shuttleworth have made him lose all management skills. He obviously couldn't manage a grocery store, let alone drive Canonical to become the next Apple...

Canonical has been making stupid decisions for many years. Some of us could see it back then, but most took their time... Now it is obvious to everyone but the paid trolls and the fanbois...

Let me put it simply: There is absolutely no way Canonical can create their own ecosystem. They lack the resources, they lack the community, they lack the weight. They can try, but they will fail miserably.

But this is good for us in order to receive a lesson for FOSS: Sometimes freedom is more important than convenience, and that includes software too... The next time someone complains that all of us Opensource supporters are not pragmatic enough, slap them with this news in the face...

And another thing, about Unity: Remember when they said that it is an "improvement" for the desktop? And how all the fanbois supported this "fact"? Well it is obvious now that they designed it with Tablets and Phones in mind. The emperor has no clothes, folks.... At least now you see...

Let me make a prediction: Ubuntu on Phones/Tablets will fail obviously, and then Canonical will try to focus again on the desktop, only to find out that their loyal userbase has shrunk considerably... I believe even Linux Mint will go Debian-only eventually... Linux Mint will become the next Ubuntu...

Regardless, Mir is a reality so we have to deal with it now.

And like it or not, just the announcement of Mir has already splintered the display server landscape for desktop Linux. I'm not concerned about Ubuntu on mobile because they are already being squashed on all 4 sides from Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8 and even Blackberry. Mir might be a solution for them to compete on the mobile front, we shall see.

The problem right now is how are we going to handler Mir on the desktop. Unless Canonical is BS-ing, they have mentioned that they are in the process of discussing with AMD and NVIDIA the likelihood of releasing binary drivers that are Mir-compatible, although they cleverly left out any information as to whether those drivers they are pushing for are also Wayland-capable. It's a good thing that the existing Mesa and Gallium drivers are workable on both Mir and Wayland, but the fact that Mir requires a custom Mesa stack is of a little concern.

Last but not least, the programs. Again, with Mir being a reality, and with Canonical dead set on maintaining their own patches to bring Mir compatibility to GTK 3 and Qt5, you kind of get the idea that things are going to get rather nasty where applications are concerned. Most likely, upstream is not going to put much work into supporting both Mir and Wayland for their applications. And it is already difficult enough to get most developers and software projects to port their existing X applications to Wayland. IIRC, the Wayland proof-of-concept port for Libreoffice is barely even usable, Firefox and Chromium are still happilly stuck in X land with their dependence on GTK2, and the list goes on and on. Now, XWayland will definitely ease the transition, but now you got Mir added to the mix and developers are going to curse and swear and bicker about which display server to support. If Mir takes off, we are going to need ugly hacks to get Mir-capable programs to even compile for use in a Wayland environment, and vice versa. Not to mention the need for an XMir or MWayland to ensure that applications that cannot be recompiled can still run under the different display servers.

The way I see it, there are only 2 possible solutions: everyone adopts Mir and abandons Wayland, or everybody adopts Wayland and force Mir into irrelevancy by persuading upstream application developers not to support it under any circumstances.

Also, about this:

"But this is good for us in order to receive a lesson for FOSS: Sometimes freedom is more important than convenience, and that includes software too... The next time someone complains that all of us Opensource supporters are not pragmatic enough, slap them with this news in the face..."

That depends on whether the 'convenience' is splintering current landscape. Tons of drivers are proprietary, and even Intel ships proprietary firmware for their WiFi cards, while contributing a FOSS driver for their use. Same for companies like Realtek and Ralink: FOSS drivers, blob firmware. Are they in any way splintering the Linux landscape? No they are not, because their drivers work with all Linux distributions, and not just distro A or distro B only. AMD and Nvidia ships proprietary drivers with proprietary firmware, but these do not splinter Linux because their drivers generally work with all distributions. Convenience here is sound because it enables more hardware to function under Linux. Proprietary software for Linux is also convenient because it allows certain tasks to be done, tasks that can otherwise never be optimally achieved under FOSS solutions. And these are usually not distribution specific; you don't see proprietary driver A working with only distro B, or proprietary software C working with only Distro D.

What Ubuntu us doing, on the other hand, is essentially segregating itself from Linux to the point where "Ubuntu" and "Linux" are two seperate terms, and no longer "Ubuntu IS Linux". Stuff compiled for Mir is almost going to work exclusively on Ubuntu only and definitely not going to work on other distributions. And when something that is so low-level and fundamental to a working desktop Linux install becomes distro-specific, then you have a point to make about convenience vs open.

Besides, as far as i know, Mir IS FOSS, licensed under the LGPL v3 and fully available in source form.

[Pallidus]

Now is a good idea to abandon this worthless piece of trash of a distro before it is too late, since they're effectively trying to make themselves incompatible with other distros. A program running on Ubuntu will not run on other Linux distros, creating a vendor lock in.

really, and use what?


tell me


coz from here besides ubuntu and ubunu based shit (mint etc) the other only acceptable option is fedora and they fucked up royally with f18 and gnome.


as anyone EVER STOPPED to think that they probably got so frustrated at waylands development pace, AND JUST WANTED, nay, NEEDED, something and something FAST.



wayland this and wayland that...


wayland in 5 years time,

fuck that

x.org is a piece of shit and I want out NOW

mir or wayland

I want to use it NOW

not in 5 years time


learn to develop FAST like professionals

instead of whining and bitching