Shuttleworth On Mir: "A Fantastic Piece of Engineering"

[smitty3268]

He still doesn’t own KWin. He should be supporting the best solutions, and if that's Mir, do it. If he plays politics then he should be booted by the community.

KDE has a lot to gain with Ubuntu's move into QT.

Martin sort of does own KWin. That's his job, as the official maintainer. And I think the community has been pretty unanimous in it's panning of Mir. If someone wants to fork it, they are welcome to do so, that's one of the benefits of open source.

Anyway, you are sort of missing the point. Ubuntu is still going to ship an X server, for backwards compatibility. KWin already supports that, so it's not like they are going to stop working on Ubuntu all of a sudden. It will just keep working in X, while other distros move on to Wayland.

[GreatEmerald]

Nonsense. In the mind of the consumer, "what's Linux?", and "what's Ubuntu?". Seriously, the average computer user still has no idea what either of them are...

I wouldn't bet on it. Linux is not unheard of by regular users. Most have never used it, and may not realise what a distribution is, but they do hear about it.

That reminds me of one YouTuber I know, in his view Linux is a magic box that can do anything, but is difficult to set up and adapt to. Whenever he complains about something on Windows and I remark that the problem is not there on Linux, his reaction is typically "*sigh*... Of course it would be, wouldn't it."

Last time i checked, everybody is entitled to develop their own opensource solution.

Yes, they are. From what I can see, though, the negative effects of that could be the proliferation of X11 and less/slower/fragmented driver support from vendors. Though we will have to wait and see how this develops to tell if these will be an issue. If there is any development to be had, anyway, since to me the schedule for Mir sounds like a plan to build Rome in a day.

[phoen1x]

On the contrary - they were the first group to publicly promote Wayland, Mark grandly declaring that within a year or so, Ubuntu would be moving to it. But as you say, things change.

Oh wow all hail canonical. Seriously back then wayland was described as the next big thing in linux and all canonical did just jumped on to the hype train and that's it. Just fucking hilarious. Someone does the hard job and someone says HEY WE WILL USE IT and brainwashed idiots hail to that who said WE WILL USE IT. Hilarious.
Trade secrets, competition LOL SmSpillaz, u are not the creator of compiz u are just a sellout working for canonical, why u act like you or anyone from canonical ever created something on their own. I guess forked compiz code with one distro specific patches are so good for whole linux community.[sarcasm]

[Triv00ett]

Wayland supports some, but not all, present day Android GPU chipsets.

[phoen1x]

And i wonder who are so called competition? Is it redhat,oracle,ibm,google? Competing with competition by using competition's code. That's genious.

[valeriodean]

Ubuntu will be pushed with Mir and since Ubuntu is pretty popular these days and will also get a release on other platforms (smartphones) it will guarantee that Mir will be pretty popular. So Nvidia and Valve and everybody will make sure they will support it first and then maybe Wayland. Wayland guys you've had you're time. You screwed up with your slow coding and now people are tired of waiting for you and starting doing it themselves even with less experience. Technically Mir might end up inferior to Wayland but that won't matter since Wayland will be WayWhat? Nobody will hear about it in a few years. And I can already hear the Wayland devs bitching and moaning about how they had a better design but the world is unfair and only up to make a quick buck etc etc. You took too much time to make it perfect and you lost the competition. Probably we'll get Mir in 14.04 and Wayland will still be supported by the Linux fanatics who consider Canonical to be Satan. All three of them....

You start with the assumption that Mir will be done for sure.
Wrong assumption. They have no idea how to move from words spreaded in a wiki page to a working display server.
Prepare yourself for the biggest epic failure of the hystory: Mir.

[aironeous]

I like this guys response about mir on this thread pg 1 at steam linux discussion
http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410...61629644505189

"
t.jp [Arch] [has Steam for Linux] Mar 6, 2013 @ 10:28am
Their toy display server won't see the light of day anyway in the next year. Wayland is developed by ex-X.org developers since 2008, who know what they are doing and have lots of experience with low level graphics stuff. Kristian Hoegsberg works fulltime for Intel on this.

Mir is developed by a handful of Canonical n00bs who have no clue about display server stuff. They know so little about it that they even got their stuff they complained about with Wayland all wrong. Just look at their TODO list on Launchpad and they want to implement it by October this year. If anything they will release some clusterf*ck like Unity 11.04 that is even worse than X and not even remotely on par with Wayland in terms of features. And let's not forget that it is unlikely that both AMD and NVIDIA just start supporting something that looks like it's going to be Dead on Arrival anyway. Unless Canonical wants you to play with open source Intel and Radeon driver. You can't even ues Mir with open source nvidia drivers. Even if NVIDIA supports it AMD is so slow it will take them ages. This means they alienate half of the Linux Steam Community.

Ask yourself why there are 25 windows manager 6 desktop enviroments 8 login managers 7 shells probably 20 terminal emulators but only 1 display server and 1 kernel? Becuase 1. it isn't trivial to pull a display server of 2. fragmentation is bullsh*t on the lowest level where everyone rather has 1 good solution. To bad braindead developers at Canonical don't get that. It's just about being an Apple like control freak for them.

There is not one developer that doesn't work for Canonical that actually thinks Mir is a good idea. Mhh wonder why that's the case..."

[AdamW]

hitlink's stats go back to late 2004:

Found via http://www.berkeleylug.com/?p=43

While this growth can be considered modest by some (not me)

So, hitlink is part of NetApplications is the same thing as the 'NMS' numbers I cited earlier. It looks like the post-2008 numbers on that graph match the NMS numbers I posted, so I guess the pre-2008 numbers on that graph are NMS' earlier data. If so, then indeed, NMS shows an acceleration of growth in the 2007 to 2009 timeframe: much as the w3schools numbers do. But if you take the NMS numbers and use them to extend that hitlink graph, it just flattens out right where it ends: as I wrote, the number stagnates around the 1% mark between 2009 and 2013. So the shape of the graph is 'very slow growth, followed by a shorter period of comparatively rapid growth, followed by zero growth'. And the numbers are still _really small_ - we're playing in the sandbox between 0% and 1%, here.

the other important aspect is that Ubuntu has become synonymous with the Linux desktop.

That's obviously a good thing for Ubuntu if you look at it in terms of a traditional 'competition' with other operating systems and Linux distros. Why is it a good thing for Linux as a whole, though? The fact of a single distribution obtaining pre-eminence over the others in some aspect isn't obviously and inevitably a good thing for *Linux* (or F/OSS, or whatever you like) as an ecosystem. That was kind of my thesis in the first place. I don't think anyone would dispute that, for a period of time, Ubuntu emerged as the pre-eminent desktop Linux distribution, as RHL and Mandrake and even (very briefly) Gentoo had done before; the question I was asking is 'what has Ubuntu achieved with that pre-eminence?'

And not only the desktop: Ubuntu is displacing the "classic" server distributions at an astonishing rate. See e.g. Amazon EC2 stats:


Source: http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/totals

That's only part of the picture.

Ubuntu's done well on EC2, indeed. You can't take EC2 numbers as a proxy for general server usage, though - especially *production* server usage. You can't even take them as a proxy for cloud deployments, because the numbers vary wildly between different clouds. Ubuntu's great showing on EC2 isn't so much to do with Ubuntu's merits as an OS as it is to do with the good job Ubuntu has done in producing, testing, releasing and promoting EC2 images. Which is obviously a great thing to do, and they've done it well. But it means that you can't necessarily generalize from the EC2 numbers. You can look at them on their own as a great achievement for Ubuntu, though, which they absolutely are.

The other part is that Ubuntu has reached more desktop users than all other distros combined.

This is not an assertion I've ever seen backed with any hard numbers. Ubuntu is typically very vague about its actual usage statistics, and few other distros even try to release numbers; Fedora releases some, with an extensive caveat attached about how they could be utterly wrong. It's very, very hard to count Linux distro users reliably.

The same is currently happening for servers. EC2 is somewhat ahead of the curve because it is not as inert as SOHO or even enterprise sectors, but clearly shows where we are heading.

See above; it doesn't, necessarily. After all, RHEL has a stunning 100% of the OpenShift market. Clouds are funny things.

[AdamW]

On the economic/commerical front, i would be curious to see Redhat or Oracle vs. Canonical incomes, in terms of paid support / services / subscriptions, annually

You won't, at least until Canonical goes public (if it ever does). But I doubt anyone would dispute that RH's are substantially greater than Canonical's. Simple headcount would tell you that.

I think our current income is around $1.3bn/year, profit somewhere over $100m.

[BO$$]

You start with the assumption that Mir will be done for sure.
Wrong assumption. They have no idea how to move from words spreaded in a wiki page to a working display server.
Prepare yourself for the biggest epic failure of the hystory: Mir.

What makes you think Mir won't get done? Do you really think Canonical is made of complete idiots?