Future Plans For Ubuntu's Unity Still Being Discussed

[coder543]

Not quite because the number of people who know about wayland is certainly larger than 3 otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion, now if you're talking people who know about X that's a different matter. And you do realize that that same argument could be used about Steve Ballmer's FUDing against Linux right? "Oh most people don't even know what linux is so why should you care? there are bigger problems in life to worry about"

Ultimately Canonical is playing very foul and people are angry because of it, and it should be made note that this is far from the first time. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with people being angry at them for doing that, anymore than you yourself going against .NET because you don't like Microsoft's actions. I'll argue legal and technical issues but there's absolutely nothing wrong with people being angry at a company.

You're really using a straw man fallacy. Microsoft was training Best Buy employees to believe Linux was bad. Half of America gets their tech advice from Best Buy, so if the Best Buy employees believe Linux is bad, then that is impacting a huge swath of the population. Most Best Buy employees have never used Linux before, so they cannot see through the FUD. Steve Ballmer really doesn't matter though, since no one listens to him, and most customers really don't know who he is; they believe Bill Gates is still the CEO of Microsoft. In this case though, we have a very elite group of technically minded people who will be making the decision of Wayland vs X vs Mir for their particular distro, and those people know enough about Wayland to see the falsehoods in what Canonical stated. The people who download and install distros do not care what display server they're using, as long as it works. You are one of the very, very few exceptions to that, but as you've noted, you can see through their FUD, and so their FUD does not impact you. At all. Those distro maintainers will still use Wayland, and therefore you won't even have to worry about changing out the display server to be less tainted by Canonical. Remind me again how this impacts anyone. Your anger is unwarranted. If they had left the FUD up after it had been disproven, then your anger might be justified, since maybe, possibly, one day in a future where end users care about display servers, they would look back at the past and have negative feelings towards Wayland because of an article from Canonical that they found on the subject. Since during the time period that the article was up, it had no impact on anyone's perception of Wayland, and the statement has since been retracted and will never have an impact on anyone's perception of Wayland, it is anger for the sake of anger. Get out more, talk to people. You can ask everyone you see on the street what their favorite display server is, and not a one of them will tell you Mir, or even X or Wayland. They don't care. So let the technical maintainers do their job where they will look past the FUD and you will not be affected.

[coder543]

Hah, so anyone who disagrees with decisions made by the Ubuntu camp are now trolls? That seems a bit unfair.

These decisions affect the entire desktop Linux community, since Ubuntu has a majority market share. It's not like the people behind openSuSE or Fedora want this dependence on Ubuntu for success. But Ubuntu does have some responsibility not to destroy the software stack without a good reason. I just think these changes are ill-advised, and we're going to run into a lot of trouble having an open ecosystem with people focusing on a heavily patched distro. The extreme case would be something like OS X, where you clearly cannot run Mac DMGs unmodified in FreeBSD.

I like Ubuntu and what is has done to popularize free software, make no mistake. But I hope these changes don't threaten compatibility with other distributions in the future. Luckily, most app developers are aware of the issues and likely wouldn't make something that wouldn't work outside of Ubuntu's Mir/Unity combo. It's just dangerous to play with things like this, and if Mir isn't of sufficient quality, it will make Linux as a whole look bad, even if the rest of us advocate for more mature and portable display alternatives, like Wayland.

There's nothing wrong with disagreement, but anger and resentment are not called for or desirable. It's childish. I sincerely doubt it will impact compatibility, as the whole of Unity Next is based on Qt5, so even that is dubious. Qt5 is perfectly capable of being used cross platform, and as you say, developers are aware of the other distros.

[Luke_Wolf]

You're really using a straw man fallacy. Microsoft was training Best Buy employees to believe Linux was bad. Half of America gets their tech advice from Best Buy, so if the Best Buy employees believe Linux is bad, then that is impacting a huge swath of the population. Most Best Buy employees have never used Linux before, so they cannot see through the FUD. Steve Ballmer really doesn't matter though, since no one listens to him, and most customers really don't know who he is; they believe Bill Gates is still the CEO of Microsoft. In this case though, we have a very elite group of technically minded people who will be making the decision of Wayland vs X vs Mir for their particular distro, and those people know enough about Wayland to see the falsehoods in what Canonical stated. The people who download and install distros do not care what display server they're using, as long as it works. You are one of the very, very few exceptions to that, but as you've noted, you can see through their FUD, and so their FUD does not impact you. At all. Those distro maintainers will still use Wayland, and therefore you won't even have to worry about changing out the display server to be less tainted by Canonical. Remind me again how this impacts anyone. Your anger is unwarranted. If they had left the FUD up after it had been disproven, then your anger might be justified, since maybe, possibly, one day in a future where end users care about display servers, they would look back at the past and have negative feelings towards Wayland because of an article from Canonical that they found on the subject. Since during the time period that the article was up, it had no impact on anyone's perception of Wayland, and the statement has since been retracted and will never have an impact on anyone's perception of Wayland, it is anger for the sake of anger. Get out more, talk to people. You can ask everyone you see on the street what their favorite display server is, and not a one of them will tell you Mir, or even X or Wayland. They don't care. So let the technical maintainers do their job where they will look past the FUD and you will not be affected.

This isn't a strawman because the issue is about being angry over foul play, which there's some very strong points going in that favour, not many ones that say to the contrary. Here's the thing about your example, when was the last time you walked into a best buy and saw linux running on a computer for sale (not counting android or chromeOS). For that matter when was the last time you walked into any major electronics or computer store and saw that? Am I right in my guess that you say maybe a few during the height of netbooks and at no other time? So given that and given most people don't care enough to install or even investigate alternative OSes (Hell they don't even know what they're running they think their office version is their OS) how much effect do you think that really had? Marginal if any right? so going by your own rules isn't it childish to be angry at them over that?

Foul play is foul play and people have a right and even a duty to be angry over it, no matter if it effects a few people or a bunch it's still foul play. Not to try to invoke Godwin's law here but there's a poem that's relevant to this whole idea of "it doesn't effect me so why should I or anyone else care? It's childish to get angry over it":

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.