Ubuntu Announces Mir, A X.Org/Wayland Replacement

[Pallidus]

I have been hearing about wayland for 2 years now



.....



............ ?

[ninez]

I hope they receive some real backlash for their exploitation of the FOSS community. Canonical is only involved with FOSS for free labor, nothing more...

I think some projects should seriously consider refusing to add support for anything Canonical requires and force them to maintain forks on every piece of software / library that they want to use on the 'Ubuntu platform'. Don't add support for Mir, Unity Next or any of that crap, in fact - do the opposite - make your software incompatible with Ubuntu-specific stuff, beyond repair (without a ton of work on their part).

..or people could start writing malicious code that only affects ubuntu-specific stuff. Since Canonical is consciously doing harm to FOSS anyway.

[nerdopolis]

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?!

[Hamish Wilson]

I think people are seriously overestimating Canonical's amount of pull and influence here. After all, they are just a company with an admittedly sizable but hardly dominating chunk of Linux market-share, and pretensions of being the next Android. Compared to companies like Red Hat, Intel, AMD, etc they are pretty much insignificant, with almost no upstream contributions to their credit and limited influence on other distributions other than clones such as Linux Mint. I think they are going to have a hard time getting anyone to take this seriously.

It simply does not have that much of a leg to stand on. Whatever Red Hat backs is going to be the choice of the enterprise and embedded markets, as Red Hat has a strong profitable base and a whole community of reliable customers behind them, and you can bet that Red Hat is not going to want Canonical to dominate the graphics stack and will instead go with the upstream solution where they already have great influence. That means no matter what Wayland is far from dead, and if AMD and Nvidia want to be taken seriously they will have to support at least both Wayland and Mir (AMD especially since Catalyst is primarily for 3D workstations).

The main trouble spot is going to be the incompatibilities of duelling implementations. Valve's strong endorsement of Ubuntu is problematic here, although I have found Valve to be problematic from the very beginning.

Still, we did not need this mess. Whatever happens Canonical has thrown a sizable wrench into what was going to be a fairly smooth transition.

[z0id]

It's clear that they haven't really considered using Wayland. Their anti-Wayland arguments are bogus. What they don't like about Wayland is that it's not their project - just like with upstart/systemd. On some blog, a dev said "developed by Ubuntu, for Ubuntu". Canonical never contributes or takes part in the community, although they take all they can from it and use "community" as a buzzword all the time. What really annoys me this time is that they're screwing with all the other people in the FLOSS community who are trying to switch to Wayland.
I'm really dissapointed with Canonical.

[intellivision]

I hope they receive some real backlash for their exploitation of the FOSS community. Canonical is only involved with FOSS for free labor, nothing more...

I think some projects should seriously consider refusing to add support for anything Canonical requires and force them to maintain forks on every piece of software / library that they want to use on the 'Ubuntu platform'. Don't add support for Mir, Unity Next or any of that crap, in fact - do the opposite - make your software incompatible with Ubuntu-specific stuff, beyond repair (without a ton of work on their part).

..or people could start writing malicious code that only affects ubuntu-specific stuff. Since Canonical is consciously doing harm to FOSS anyway.

So just how the open source community goes out of its way to make everything incompatible with Android?

...or does it?

[89c51]

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.

Hairy from a technical POV or something else. And if its the technical stuff this means that Canonical will have to go through it to get it to work right?

Also on the red hat/wayland comments. Are there any WL contributors from red hat?



Also (from Hoegsbergs G+):

Lennart Poettering: I am sure "Mir" is going to be a project with a fantastic future, just like bazaar, or Upstart, or Project Harmony before it.

LOLZZZZ

[remm]

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.

[liam]

It totally makes sense to me... They are using one framework(Qt) for Desktop/Tablet/Smartphone.
But damn sh!t... Why are they dropping Gtk?
I kinda fell in love with Vala. Now C++ is the language of choice.

Why are you developing for only one distro?
There are far too many distros with significent users bases to discount them, especially when making things cross distro isn't that much more work.

[ninez]

So just how the open source community goes out of its way to make everything incompatible with Android?

...or does it?

I'm not sure where you get the idea that people are making their software incompatible with Android - but i haven't gotten that impression at all, in any sense. - nor was i saying anything along those lines.

Android also is not built (the way Ubuntu is) around Gnu/Linux. ...and there is a big difference between Google and Canonical ~ aside from Google being highly profitable and *actually* making decent contributions to FOSS; google summer of code, linux kernel development, etc - while canonical is NOT a wildly profitable company and essentially just uses FOSS developers as free labor force.

Google also doesn't hype their FOSS community involvement and tout themselves as being the 'shepards/leaders of open-source' the way that Mark Shuttleworth and his band of morons tend to.

Anyway, i don't see ubuntu phone being successful (compared to google) and i do think upstream developers shouldn't support Canonical's efforts, nor support ubuntu-specific crap like Mir...