

Mir – Ubuntu's new display server - mnazim
http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-as-a-new-home/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ubuntu-news+%28Ubuntu+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

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meaty
Yay more "not invented here". The list of OS's is going to be: MacOS X,
windows, Linux and completely separately Ubuntu by time they've replaced
everything.

Canonical are turning into a 1990's style Unix vendor. We haven't forgotten
that crock of shit yet.

~~~
leetrout
"We haven't forgotten that crock of shit yet."

Ahahaha. That's great.

I was coming here to post the same thing as a question... Because I feel like
they're on a mission to replace all the core components for the look and feel.

Is this a stated mission? Have they replaced anything else "major" other than
the window manager?

~~~
mnazim
I, as an end user, care about what I see and interact with. Why should I care
about what's behind the scenes? If replacing the X is what it takes to reach
the goal so be it.

Of course, if it turns into something designed to takes away my freedoms, then
I have to worry.

~~~
meaty
The thing is that you are sacrificing your freedom to it. You're being slowly
locked into another incompatible platform.

One of the great freedoms of open source software is to go "fuck you disty,
I'm off to another one". When all your stuff is coded against Mir, Upstart and
Unity, you no longer have that luxury.

Also, beauty is only skin deep.

------
fosap
>Tailored towards an EGL/GL(ES) world.

Oh no. Enabling compositing in metacity lets my accu die one hole hour earlier
(about 30% earlier). In the age of mobile you __please __stop assuming "There
is enough GPU/CPU power anyway"? Yes there is, but it consumes electricity.

On the other hand I'm looking forward to a x11 replacement. A display server
in the spirit of x11 with lots of features thrown out. Fonts are rendered in
the program anyway today. And less network round-trips. And allow me the
change the output server or even just the display of a running program.

~~~
wmf
Don't Windows, OS X, and all phones get fine battery life with compositing?

~~~
meaty
Only by turning the display and controller off after 20-30 seconds.

------
mnazim
(OFF TOPIC: OP here. Mir is my family/last name. My friend sent me the link
with subject line - "You are Ubuntu's new display server".)

~~~
themstheones
That's a classic. You should print out that email and frame it!

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keithpeter
" _a beautiful and lean user experience_ "

Yes please! Especially the lean bit. Saves all those older laptops and PCs
filling up the landfill. Do I really need something more powerful than a Cray
1 to run a noddy spreadsheet or an R script?

" _Tightly integrated with the Unity shell, fulfilling the shell’s
requirements while at the same time not dictating any sort of semantics up the
stack._ "

Does that mean that Linux graphical applications will 'just work' on the
Unity/MIR platform?

" _we wanted to decouple the way the shell works on top of the display server
from the application-facing protocol_ "

That sounds like what I was asking above. E.g. LibreOffice will 'just work'

" _We are in active conversations with GPU vendors to enable Mir on those
drivers/GPUs, too_ "

oh-oh; nvidia not on board so back to Debian from the one after Wheezy...

It will be fun to watch... possibly on the sidelines if they don't sort nvidia
drivers

------
troymc
I wince at the choice of name. Mir, the space station, didn't help anyone get
to the Moon. It was eventually crashed into the ocean, on purpose.

~~~
MaysonL
Мир(Mir), in Russian, is either "world", or "peace", not merely the name given
to the space station.

~~~
troymc
From the post: "The project was born and we decided to name it Mir (as in the
space station), as it would be our outpost that finally enables us to reach
our goal of arriving at the moon, providing a seamless and beautiful user
experience spanning multiple form-factors."

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csense
More comments are available on this HN thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5319434>

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Thev00d00
Interesting that they decided to "reimplement" stuff again. Nice to see them
going with Qt though.

~~~
eloisant
People on the Linux Desktop have been talking about getting rid of X for
years, literally. Everyone agrees that X was designed in a very different
world from today, and with its client/server architecture it's pulling back
the Linux Desktop more that anything else. But nothing ever comes out of it.

In the mean time: * MacOSX used a Unix kernel but they didn't use a line of
X11 * Android is based on Linux but again, no X.

Ubuntu is the first distro with a clear plan to actually get rid of that crap.
And now people are bashing them? What do you think they should do, start
discussing with Debian, Fedora and the others about the best think to do? But
people have been talking about getting rid of X for years already!

Here is how it works: 1\. Get shit done 2\. If other people find it
useful/interesting, they'll use it and maybe work with you to improve it.

Never try to do 2. before 1. in Open Source, it doesn't work.

~~~
shmerl
People get things done - Wayland. Comes along Canonical and creates their own
stuff just because Wayland is not controlled by them. Must be so fun to
fragment Linux even more.

~~~
icarus_drowning
To be fair, they give other reasons for dropping Wayland. You might not
believe them, but you're hardly giving them much of an argument.

~~~
shmerl
Their reasons don't sound convincing, and Wayland developers refuted them also
pointing out that Canonical didn't even engage in any dialog with them
whatsoever. They just created their own thing silently in secret. Such kind of
approach doesn't add to credibility of their reasoning.

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tiglionabbit
Perhaps this will make it easier to handle multi touch?

------
drivebyacct2
So, where does GNOME fit into this? Unity is still very much layered on top of
GNOME services. With Unity Next heavily utilizing Qt5/QML2, I'm very curious
if they want to remove their dependence on GNOME for other system services.

THAT is something I'd love to see someone work on. Switching between KDE/GNOME
is frustrating because there is so insanely much duplicated between the two
with slightly different feature sets.

Mir, meh. I'm guessing it has most to do with being able to target existing
Android devices. Most of the design rationale applies to Wayland as well,
(including the things they seem to mark against Wayland, strangely)

