UBports Has A Lot Of Work This Summer For Letting Ubuntu Touch Live On

[phoronix]

Phoronix: UBports Has A Lot Of Work This Summer For Letting Ubuntu Touch Live On

It's now been nearly two months since Canonical announced they were abandoning their Unity 8 / Ubuntu Phone dreams and about the same amount of time since the forks started around Unity 8, Mir, and Ubuntu Touch itself...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UBports-1-June-2017

[gotwig]

I think stopping unity next development was a massive misstake. On the other side canonical responsibles behaved like dicks to the OSS community... So now at least got the second part fixed.

[profoundWHALE]

Instead of making Unity 8 work on wayland, they should make Mir work like Kwin or Mutter so that we can begin using Unity 8 right away.

[microcode]

Instead of making Unity 8 work on wayland, they should make Mir work like Kwin or Mutter so that we can begin using Unity 8 right away.

I think that may be the way they would approach it, though I guess they could still choose to do something else.

[starshipeleven]

Instead of making Unity 8 work on wayland, they should make Mir work like Kwin or Mutter so that we can begin using Unity 8 right away.

Um, kwin and mutter are wayland desktop compositors (or x11 desktop compositors), aren't both the options you mention actually the same thing?

I'd rather have them focus all on porting Unity on wayland, as once it is there it will get in every distro's repo and reap the benefits of that, while none will care much about Unity8+Mir.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

Instead of making Unity 8 work on wayland, they should make Mir work like Kwin or Mutter so that we can begin using Unity 8 right away.

What they actually do is running Mir on top of Wayland: https://github.com/ubports/mir/commi...93a3503aa69150

[BwackNinja]

What they actually do is running Mir on top of Wayland: https://github.com/ubports/mir/commi...93a3503aa69150

I'm a bit confused. That's clearly Mir as a Wayland client, rather than supporting Wayland clients. Is the plan to make Unity 8 into a Westin plugin? Otherwise, they'd still need a compositor to run on and have extra integration to operate as DE elements. Why would they want to run on top of a compositor when the are a compositor?

[bregma]

Instead of making Unity 8 work on wayland, they should make Mir work like Kwin or Mutter so that we can begin using Unity 8 right away.

Not sure what you mean: Mir does work like Kwin or Mutter in that it's a compositing display manager, except it can also be used as the system compositor (so it's a superset of what they do) and has far more extensive WM support (again, a superset). Perhaps you mean someone should add support to Mir for the Wayland protocol so that Wayland clients can connect to Unity 8? If that's the case, then yes, that would be good.

The current UBports work to make Unity 8 be a Wayland client and talk to another system compositor is a dead end and is the exact opposite of what needs to be done. I wish them luck with that.

Of course, "begin using Unity 8 right away" has been here for years and I still have useful machines in my lab that run only Unity 8 as bought from their commercial manufacturers as proof so that's a little disingenuous, but I take your point.

[WLBI]

I am Patreon sponsor of UBports, because I really like that concept for phones.

https://www.patreon.com/ubports/posts

I bought the first Ubuntu phone right away, when it was released and I love that concept and how to handle it. Some weeks ago I bought an Android phone and I am really pissed off, how hard it is to handle compared to the Ubuntu Phone.
To become successful, those guys need some money. Because without money, you can not be a full time developer and push that project.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

I'm a bit confused. That's clearly Mir as a Wayland client, rather than supporting Wayland clients. Is the plan to make Unity 8 into a Westin plugin? Otherwise, they'd still need a compositor to run on and have extra integration to operate as DE elements. Why would they want to run on top of a compositor when the are a compositor?

From what I gathered this is probably the fastest way to get the existing stack on top of Wayland so you don't have to worry about hardware support.