Canonical Announces Mir Back-End For Mainline Mesa

[cykusz]

Instead of creating whole new display server, they could build unity atop wayland, just like kwin, gnome-shell, e17 and others would do. Wayland devs would be more than happy cooperating with Canonical to suit wayland protocol to their needs.. Thats the point of display server to be as universal as possible. With Mir, its possible that it will only power Unity, negating the whole purpose of general display server, which every distro can easily use

[Luke_Wolf]

IIRC Microsoft was in breach of the GPL with Hyper-V otherwise we never would of seen it.

Well it's basically got to do with Azure, the customers wanted Linux not windows so Microsoft had to bend, and they had to make their virtualization solution for linux better as a result. There may have been GPL violation stuff there too but they're continuing to be developed due to azure.

[Siekacz]

Instead of creating whole new display server, they could build unity atop wayland, just like kwin, gnome-shell, e17 and others would do. Wayland devs would be more than happy cooperating with Canonical to suit wayland protocol to their needs.. Thats the point of display server to be as universal as possible. With Mir, its possible that it will only power Unity, negating the whole purpose of general display server, which every distro can easily use

Choose: Wayland with a lot of compromises, which require additional work to make it suit your needs and Mir which suits you perfectly. First solution requires a lot more work, because of conflicts in goals. Second needs a lot of work only at the beginning, but then much less - once you write it you have exactly what you want, and you don't need to worry about others. Wayland would never suit Ubuntu, because of shared code with others. Canonical would be blocked with a lot of things, just because they are "distro-specific".

Mir is goal-driven, not community-driven, what makes Mir development much faster. They don't need to wait on agreement on the community side to make things work.

Mir will be fully reusable with other DE's. Obviously, it will be designed to work with Unity, but it doesn't mean that running KDE or whatever won't be possible. What is Wayland designed for? Nothing.

[smitty3268]

Choose: Wayland with a lot of compromises, which require additional work to make it suit your needs and Mir which suits you perfectly.

What compromises, exactly, are you talking about? The only ones that Canonical pointed out were quickly discredited and no longer being claimed. What exactly does Wayland do that isn't what Canonical wants, because they can't seem to come up with anything. Maybe you have better sources?

Mir will be fully reusable with other DE's. Obviously, it will be designed to work with Unity, but it doesn't mean that running KDE or whatever won't be possible.

Will it? KDE has already said they won't support it. Is Canonical going to support a big 3rd party downstream patch to make it work? That would be surprising, given that they've never contributed a single patch to KWin. I'm not sure they've ever contributed a single patch to the entire KDE project. And that's going to be a lot of work, porting everything to a whole new display server.

What is Wayland designed for? Nothing.

Wayland was actually designed, at least, as opposed to Mir which seems to have just copied the general idea of Wayland and made a couple changes to make sure it's incompatible.

Canonical is really reminding me of Sun right now, only with a lot less in house expertise.

[Hamish Wilson]

Choose: Wayland with a lot of compromises, which require additional work to make it suit your needs and Mir which suits you perfectly. First solution requires a lot more work, because of conflicts in goals. Second needs a lot of work only at the beginning, but then much less - once you write it you have exactly what you want, and you don't need to worry about others. Wayland would never suit Ubuntu, because of shared code with others. Canonical would be blocked with a lot of things, just because they are "distro-specific".

What exactly has Ubuntu wanted in the display server that had been blocked? The did not even ask Wayland about what they wanted.

Mir is goal-driven, not community-driven, what makes Mir development much faster. They don't need to wait on agreement on the community side to make things work.

Which will also probably result in community developed solutions not working well with Mir, shutting Ubuntu off from the rest of Linux and suffering as a result (getting them working on it will be a lot of work in the long-run). Considering how much they actually depend on the work of the community, it seems to be a bit of a narrow-minded development for Canonical.

Mir will be fully reusable with other DE's. Obviously, it will be designed to work with Unity, but it doesn't mean that running KDE or whatever won't be possible. What is Wayland designed for? Nothing.

So wait, you say other DEs should be happy to support Mir, and yet you are saying that Wayland is bad because Ubuntu can not completely tailor itself to it? By rights Mir would be horrible to work with because it will be geared specifically for Unity and will probably not even take the suggestions of other DEs on board AT ALL.

What you are suggesting is to throw away (to use a political analogy) a democratic assembly of developers in favour of one assertive strong-man who will make all of the decisions for himself above others. I am sure Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and the like will love that....

[Siekacz]

Democracy is something that doomed a lot of OpenSource projects (democracy is good on paper, in reality it sucks and has nothing to do with freedom. Dictatorship is good or bad. Democracy always is stupid. - where is your so-called freedom? Why do you want to force Ubuntu to use the Only One Right Display Server?). Ubuntu is "meritocracy", as it was said in the past.

Wayland is not compatibile with Andoid drivers (Weston branch was killed some weeks ago), and for Ubuntu compatibility with Android drivers is crucial. Wayland dev's will say they don't need this and we have conflict of interests and IBC (Invented By Canonical) syndrome kicks in, because of distro-specific patches. It's a between wind and water situation. They need control over their product, Wayland takes this control away and puts it in the hands of RedHat and other anti-Canonical entities. Wayland is not ready and won't be in a year or two, and Canonical can't wait. Even if they supported Wayland they simply coudn't fast-progress, because of outside-Canonical people involved in wayland development.

That's why they keep on using upstart instead of systemd, which is a doing-everything-monolithic-bloatware (ironically it's against modularity of Linux).

PS. I am waiting MS code being thrown out of the window from kernel, because of Hyper-V-specific patches.

[cykusz]

Wayland is not compatibile with Andoid drivers (Weston branch was killed some weeks ago), and for Ubuntu compatibility with Android drivers is crucial.

It was not killed, but suspended because of lack of maintanance, but that is how open source works. Scratch your own itch. You need Android drivers compatibility, you submit patches, you take Android support from git history and start maintaining it, and by doing that you help all the linux community, not only your own distro. Thats how wayland is progressing. SDL, Qt, Enlightement devs are all sending patches to wayland to make it suitable for their "selfish" needs, but Canonical seems to not understand that, with harm for the whole linux community. They just create redundant display server. And yes, they can prepare Mir for Ubuntu 14.04, but it will be vastly inferior to wayland, running only single desktop environment.

[Hamish Wilson]

Way to respond to basically none of my points. Your screed about Ubuntu being attacked from all sides by a virulent community out for it's own destruction is debatable enough, but you also failed to address my main point about Mir, which is that if it does become the default display server it will place all of the power in Canonical's hands, and everyone else will be in an even worse position to the one you ascribed to Canonical. You take Canonical's side so willingly when it comes to letting them control their own destiny, but fail to realize that taking the power from the community will force the community to be in an even worse situation when it comes to being forced into Canonical's mono-culture. Considering how much Canonical has depended on the community for much of it's current infrastructure and status, that seems like quite a bad bargain.

[phoen1x]

Ubuntu compatibility with Android drivers is crucial.

PS. I am waiting MS code being thrown out of the window from kernel, because of Hyper-V-specific patches.

Haha crucial? Because they want to promote their shitty buntu phone, even though it has no exciting features compared to android.
Why would sane people throw away MS patches?
Funny, you said wayland is not ready, even though MIR is nowhere near as complete as wayland. Canonical does not have enough man power to create big project like next display server.

[bartek]

This is best picture of so-called "FOSS Community". Hate, jealous, hypocrisy and IBC (Invented By Canonical) syndrome. If Mir will be successful, then it is only GOOD for everyone. If not - it will fail, so who cares? Go on Canonical, show what you can do and don't look at jealous and hating guys just because you do not want to use their code. Ubuntu is your distro and if Wayland does not fulfill your expectations and forces compromises just don't use it.

Exactly ... +1 :-)