Ubuntu Announces Mir, A X.Org/Wayland Replacement

[dh04000]

Seriously, I think I might post this thread on reddit, this is just too funny.

[dee.]

Ok so if Canonical succeeds with this, we could be having:

- X programs, running either on XWayland over a Wayland compositor or Mir (XMir?)
- Wayland programs, running natively on a Wayland compositor or a Wayland shim/compatibility layer on Mir
- Mir programs, running natively on Mir or a Mir shim/compatibility layer on a Wayland compositor
- Backend-agnostic GTK3/Qt5 programs, running natively on Mir or Wayland

So, a huge mess on the desktop - even worse than it is now with just different toolkits.

Basically, on Mir, there will be first-class and second-class citizens - GTK3, Qt5 programs will be running natively while everything else will have to run via a compatibility layer. More problems for developers.

Wayland would run GTK3, Qt5, and Wayland programs natively, and X programs under XWayland, but it would lack the Android drivers support (unless someone ports them to wayland) and no one would have any incentive to create drivers for Wayland anymore. Everyone would just concentrate on developing Android drivers because that would be less work for them.

Didn't Canonical just say they don't want to support Android apps natively in Ubuntu because it would disincentivize developers from developing native Ubuntu apps? How is it any different with drivers?

[BO$$]

So apparently the wayland amateur kid devs are gonna get their ass handed to them when a real company does it as it should be done. Why do you think that Google does its own thing? Cause the amateurs were good enough? Admit it, amateurs in their free time cannot compete with a behemoth like canonical or other even bigger names. Everybody starts with a free software project and then diverges to meet the needs of the market, the real needs, not what those kids in their bedroom think that the market wants. Wayland is dead on arrival. Nobody wants it or supports it. The biggest names in the industry don't care about it. And don't tell me about Intel. Intel just throws anything to the wall and hopes something will stick to it. ARM is kicking their ass in the mobile arena and they are desperate.

[dee.]

So apparently the wayland amateur kid devs are gonna get their ass handed to them when a real company does it as it should be done. Why do you think that Google does its own thing? Cause the amateurs were good enough? Admit it, amateurs in their free time cannot compete with a behemoth like canonical or other even bigger names. Everybody starts with a free software project and then diverges to meet the needs of the market, the real needs, not what those kids in their bedroom think that the market wants. Wayland is dead on arrival. Nobody wants it or supports it. The biggest names in the industry don't care about it. And don't tell me about Intel. Intel just throws anything to the wall and hopes something will stick to it. ARM is kicking their ass in the mobile arena and they are desperate.

Trolls gonna troll.

[Calinou]

So apparently the wayland amateur kid devs are gonna get their ass handed to them when a real company does it as it should be done. Why do you think that Google does its own thing? Cause the amateurs were good enough? Admit it, amateurs in their free time cannot compete with a behemoth like canonical or other even bigger names. Everybody starts with a free software project and then diverges to meet the needs of the market, the real needs, not what those kids in their bedroom think that the market wants. Wayland is dead on arrival. Nobody wants it or supports it. The biggest names in the industry don't care about it. And don't tell me about Intel. Intel just throws anything to the wall and hopes something will stick to it. ARM is kicking their ass in the mobile arena and they are desperate.

Don't you whine at AMD for the high power usage of their CPUs?

[Marc Driftmeyer]

DOA. The fact they didn't jointly impact the steering of Wayland's future and already have Nvidia and AMD on-board says it all.

[BO$$]

Don't you whine at AMD for the high power usage of their CPUs?

No. Don't own and never owned an AMD CPU.

[daniels]

Its all GPL....... using free software components........ can I have some of those drugs your using? They sound like good stuff.

... with copyright assignment. You can't contribute unless you agree to sign over all your rights to Canonical.

[onicsis]

Benchmark=PhoronixTestSuite(
Mir((closed_source_driver(AMD,NVIDIA),
OSS_driver(AMD,NVIDIA, Intel)),
Xorg((closed_source_driver(AMD,NVIDIA),
OSS_driver(AMD,NVIDIA, Intel))),
Wayland(OSS_driver(AMD,NVIDIA, Intel)));//Big Headache

[daniels]

Their approach seems to not fragment the driver scene for once (being able to use android and mesa open source drivers).

Same as Wayland.

I think they want to be compatible with surface flinger so they can use proprietary drivers without spending any resources, this is not possible with wayland.

Mir is the same as Wayland here.

That's let the tablet market but they don't have the leverage to get the gpu makers to do drivers for us (users of xorg and maybe in the near future wyaland)

X.Org no, because the driver involves client-side support as well as a really painful server-side driver where you have to keep constantly changing it for every server ABI break. You'd be surprised at the level of GPU vendor interest in Wayland, since they can keep it all internal to their EGL implementation.

Being compatible with Android graphic drivers will surely bring some closed source vendors onboard, namely AMD and NVIDIA.

Not really; neither of those two care about Android.

This would force Red Hat to make a move.

Not really; Red Hat's interest is dictated by RHEL.

If they aren't bullshitting, and in October they have a shippable product under GPL that supports drivers from both X and Android, while having a more refined input model

Mir won't support X drivers, and the input model stuff is completely wrong. What they quoted about Wayland's input model was flat-out incorrect.

Even Google wich has a hard bet on ChromeOS would have to switch to MIR.

No, not at all. They don't need a window system, since they already have WebKit and Chromium which internally looks quite similar to something like Wayland. So why bother abstracting it?

Daniels, if you're reading this thread, can you explain that portion of the article to us?

I've asked them to explain it to me, actually, since unless I'm missing something huge, it's nonsense.

BTW could someone explain how they support the android graphic drivers by design and why this cannot be done with Wayland??

It can, and we looked into what it'd take at some point. The EGL integration side of it isn't actually that difficult, it's just the glue between the Android and the standard GNU/Linux components which is hairy.



If you ask me, it was going to happen anyway. Canonical don't have any interest in co-operating with the wider open source community; it's in their interest to keep everything as closed and Ubuntu-specific as possible. Just look at them and GNOME. *shrug*