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Ubuntu's Mir Display Stack Accomplished A Lot In 2019 For Being Discounted Two Years Ago

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  • Ubuntu's Mir Display Stack Accomplished A Lot In 2019 For Being Discounted Two Years Ago

    Phoronix: Ubuntu's Mir Display Stack Accomplished A Lot In 2019 For Being Discounted Two Years Ago

    It was back in April 2017 that Canonical decided they would abandon Unity 8 and switch back to GNOME. While Mir played a big role together with Unity 8, they continued working on Mir with staffing changes and a shifted focus of adding Wayland support and tailoring it for primarily IoT use-cases and tightly integrated with their Snap packaging concept. Two years later, Mir is still alive and earlier this month marked the release of Mir 1.6. Here's a look back at the Mir highlights for 2019...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Mir was DISCONTINUED, not DISCOUNTED, two years ago.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by King Mucus View Post
      Mir was DISCONTINUED, not DISCOUNTED, two years ago.
      Mir was not discontinued. It was discounted as not being viable after Canonical stopped making it their flagship graphics renderer for desktop. If it had been discontinued, development would have not continued and this article about the continued development of it would not have been posted.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by phoronix View Post
        [Canonical] continued working on Mir with staffing changes and a shifted focus of adding Wayland support and tailoring it for primarily IoT use-cases and tightly integrated with their Snap packaging concept.
        http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...r-2019-Kicking
        Perhaps a nitpick, but I think that the use of the modifier the "primarily" in the above quote is a bit misleading.

        While Mir certainly is tailored for IoT use-cases, Canonical isn't developing Mir "primarily" to support IoT use-cases, but rather to ("run[ ] on a range of Linux powered devices including traditional desktops, IoT and embedded products.")

        As an example of Mir powering a desktop, a member of Canonical's Mir team is helping to port the MATE desktop to run on Mir. (More discussion here.) Also, members of Canonical's Mir team are helping UBports with their efforts to update the Unity8 desktop to run on Mir. (Unity8 was originally written to run on "old" Mir, hence the need for updates.)

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        • #5
          Originally posted by bregma View Post
          Mir was not discontinued. It was discounted as not being viable after Canonical stopped making it their flagship graphics renderer for desktop. If it had been discontinued, development would have not continued and this article about the continued development of it would not have been posted.
          I still remember your butthurt. It was epic.

          Lecturing us here for years how Mir was so superior, only to then make the switch to Wayland.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by higgslagrangian View Post

            I still remember your butthurt. It was epic.

            Lecturing us here for years how Mir was so superior, only to then make the switch to Wayland.
            I don't recall what, if anything, bregma wrote about the superiority of Mir. But maybe he was comparing Mir's server architecture to the then available alternatives, and not comparing Mir protocol to Wayland protocol. In any case, much of the code from "old" Mir server has been retained in "new" Mir server. But now the "new" MIr server is Wayland compliant. I see no reason for anyone to feel "butthurt" regarding this outcome.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by higgslagrangian View Post
              Lecturing us here for years how Mir was so superior, only to then make the switch to Wayland.
              As a display server, Mir was proprietary not as they licensing code but in the sens that Canonical at that time has to ported (or glued) various software like Chromium
              Canonical has now brought Chromium to Mir via Ozone-Mir, which is a fork of Ozone-Wayland. Robert Carr acknowledged with Ozone-Mir, "Initial investigation in to Ozone Mir quickly lead to the observation that a large amount of code would need to be duplicated between them. In order to try to improve this situation, we have instead based our Ozone Mir work off of Ozone Wayland. Ozone Mir creates a new set of interfaces on the GPU process side abstracting the idea of utilizing an external EGL compositor."
              Or situations like Intel rejecting driver patches from Canonical
              Chris Wilson of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, steward of the xf86-video-intel open source graphics driver for Linux, wrote on Saturday that "We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream." He attributed this statement to "The Management," but did not say exactly who made the decision.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by onicsis View Post
                As a display server, Mir was proprietary not as they licensing code but in the sens that Canonical at that time has to ported (or glued) various software like Chromium
                That is a very strange definition of "proprietary".

                Adding a Mir backend for Ozone, GTK3, or whatever is no different to adding a Wayland backend to the same toolkit. Indeed, as the reference you provide states, much of the code needed to use libmirclient was identical to that needed to use libwayland.

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