

Canonical writing their own X/Wayland replacement - shadeslayer
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-March/036776.html

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randallu
Ha, I bet this one will crash and burn over Fiji too.

More information here: <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec>

They don't like X for all the normal reasons, they think Wayland might be like
X but haven't investigated (I think you can replace the input handling in the
"compositor" plugin; maybe I'm wrong).

They don't specify how they'll handle hard problems, such as:

\- Client vblank sync (as well as compositor vblank sync). Compiz, unity, etc,
don't do this now; clients run unsynced and tear.

\- Switching unoccluded windows to render directly to the framebuffer instead
of going through the compositor. Mandatory for good performance on something
like a Nexus 10 (which has a 16MB framebuffer, so nearly 1GB/s bandwidth to
deliver glClear at 60fps with no extra copies...).

\- Handling multiple clients that want to read gestures. They actually say in
their "INPUT" section that they will handle "shell" gestures "in the server",
which sounds like they're going to bake their UI into their display server.

They want it to be compatible with all of the old apps too, which Wayland
already does. I'm trying not to be judgemental, but it sounds like they want
to write something like Wayland but without designing it first. Good luck with
re-entry, guys.

~~~
nicholassmith
Bigger burn than reentry.

You're right though, this feels a bit like not developed here syndrome. X is
horrible to hack on top, and has had a good run but Wayland could be a
fantastic base for them, especially given Qt has spent time working on it.

~~~
ithkuil
Is it possible that once toolkits like qt and gtk have been ported to
simpler/more direct APIs like wayland (w.r.t X11), porting them to other APIs
like this mir would be easier than starting from scratch?

~~~
nicholassmith
Possibly, but I've followed some of the Qt Wayland development and it looks
like they've hit problems on a fairly regular basis. When you're building GUI
toolkits you're also including a certain amount of understanding of the weird
corner cases from the windowing system, so you're ending up porting a large
chunk of code and then working out what's broken.

Although, Qt might have it a bit easier as they've switched to drawing their
GUI components with OpenGL.

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ISL
Open source is wonderful. Good luck to Ubuntu, though I love X. As an end user
of X, fluxbox, and X-forwarding over ssh, X just works. I'm not looking
forward to compatibility troubles when the new fleet of X replacements
arrives.

Debian, please continue to maintain old stalwarts as Ubuntu and other distros
flirt with the new.

~~~
slurgfest
What happens to the X windows forwarded over ssh when the connection drops?
Can you reattach afterwards?

~~~
wmf
No, I think the app gets killed.

~~~
donio
Depends on the app. Emacs can survive and re-attach later. A single emacs
session can be connected to multiple X (and tty) sessions at a time. I use
this all day, my emacs session runs for weeks or months between restarts and I
just connect/disconnect to X servers or ttys as needed.

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mercurial
You may want to go to <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec> if you want to read
about their motivations. I don't enough about Wayland to say if their
argumentation is justified or not.

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nuclear_eclipse
Somehow, I'm less than surprised. I'm waiting for them to decide to roll their
own browser, email client, and office suite...

~~~
mpyne
Don't forget about their own programming language. :)

~~~
obviouslygreen
Rubunthy on Mails?

[edit: Oops, I've jumped all the way to their own web development framework.
At least this way they can also build their own DSL's.]

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meaty
They ought to fix all the pretty basic bugs and commit to actually supporting
their customers before they bite this off.

LaunchPad is a testament to the shit state Ubuntu is in. All the windows are
broken so we'll knock half the building down and rebuild it. Doesn't work.

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scarmig
...really?

X is an abomination. But why not Wayland? Anyone care to present Canonical's
argument, with concrete examples of what they find so offensive about it?

~~~
minimax
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Westo...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Weston.3F)

~~~
wmf
If Wayland's input handling is not good enough, why didn't they raise that on
the mailing list any time in the last few years?

What does "The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered
privileged from our perspective" even mean?

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chris_wot
I think it's just as interesting (if not more so) that they are moving away
from Gnome to Qt!

~~~
dylan-m
That bit is nice to see, but I'm pretty suspicious of it. They're going to
have to write _a lot_ of software to fill the gaps, now, if they mean to have
Qt everywhere. GNOME provides a lot of functionality beyond the UI toolkit and
the shell, including myriads of small applications we take for granted. I'm
curious where Canonical is going to find the engineering resources to handle
all of this.

~~~
zanny
> including myriads of small applications we take for granted

As someone who runs Arch with KDE and an intentionally different Gnome theme
just so I can notice the apps I use running Gnome, there aren't _too_ many. In
Ubuntu-space, definitely, since their entire ecosystem was built on gnome, but
in general you can easily get a gnome-less Linux.

~~~
codygman
Gnome-less debian user right here!

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IgorPartola
Another item of note in this post is that they are moving Unity to Qt.

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shmerl
Did they give any rationale why they can't use Wayland?

~~~
saidajigumi
Yes. Canonical clearly lays out the project motivations, including not
choosing to use Wayland, on the Mir wiki page[1].

[1]
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Westo...](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Weston.3F)

~~~
shmerl
What worries me is fragmentation of drivers. It can be a very serious problem.

~~~
bratsche
They'll probably use the same KMS and EGL drivers that Wayland and others use.

~~~
binarycrusader
Yes, this is covered in the wiki page linked to in the email:

    
    
      https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec

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Zigurd
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet: Ubuntu was able to cobble
together Ubuntu Touch running on Surface Flinger as a compositor.

There are limitations to that, including lack of really working support for
multiple monitors.

Mir may be designed to fill in the deficiencies of Surface Flinger for use as
a compositor for Ubuntu. That might make project scope controllable enough to
think it could succeed.

