
Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir - mksaunders
http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-thomas-vos-of-mir/
======
tormeh
Jonathan Blow posted this on Twitter: "I kind of don't understand what's the
big deal with these 'modern' "display servers" like Wayland / Mir / etc. it
ought to be kind of simple actually, because we now have all this experience
with drawing graphics and we know how it should go. So I wonder if it's just
being made more complicated than it really needs to be, the same way GUI
libraries always are. GUI libraries are generally terrible, but this is self-
perpetuating as people making new GUI libs absorb bad assumptions from the old
ones. There's an interview up with a Mir developer who mentions Mir is
structured as communication via a protocol over sockets. And, like, I have
literally NO IDEA why you would build a window system like that in 2014. It
makes no sense to me at all. (But if you do decide that's how things should
go, things become a lot more complicated, so that's at least part of the
problem.)

A major reason computers are so unreliable and un-fun to use is because
software is now a massive pile of overcomplication. When it comes to a core
thing like a window system, that many programs will interface with, simplicity
should be a high design priority. Because every bit of complication that goes
into the window system propagates. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM becomes more
complicated. Every piece of software becomes harder to develop. The toll in
man-years becomes HUGE very quickly. Yet for some reason people don't learn. I
think there is some Stockholm Syndrome happening: programmers can't even
imagine how much more they would get done if the underlying systems were as
simple, reasonable and solid as they should be."

I'm curious about HN's opinion on this.

~~~
sdegutis
Yes, it uses sockets. How else would you do it?

I mean, it's a _server_. It's a singleton process, which many other processes
much communicate with. What other widely supported ICP technique do you think
is better for this job, and would make it simpler to develop against?

~~~
chrisseaton
Maybe he thinks shared memory would be simpler?

------
NickPollard
The headline here is attention grabbing, but this is actually a very solid
interview with an expert developer talking about the pitfalls of protocol and
API development, and the issues both technical and political of such a huge
change of something like a Display Server.

It was good perspective, and I look forward to seeing where both Mir and
Wayland end up.

~~~
mkesper
What about changing to the original: "Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir" or maybe
"Interview: Thomas Voß of Mir (Wayland competitor)"

------
antimagic
I don't know if it's the same for everybody, but this page is loading really
slowly for me. Here's the Google cache version if you're having trouble:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ouh2mtF...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ouh2mtFQHvIJ:www.linuxvoice.com/interview-
thomas-vos-of-mir/+&cd=1&hl=fr&ct=clnk&gl=fr)

------
toyg
_> at the heart of convergence lies the fact that you want to scale across
different form factors_

I have this feeling one day we'll look back at this and laugh. "Do you
remember when they all tried to shove the same interface on all devices? What
were they _thinking_?!"

~~~
nextos
I don't think this is that silly. For example, tiling window managers scale
extremely well all the way from a small netbook with 8 or 9 inches to multiple
27 or 30 inch monitors.

~~~
valarauca1
The problem isn't so much the 8 to 80 inch gap. We've solved that problem. The
problem is the 8 to 1 inch gap. Tilling window managers start to fail on smart
phone/tablet size screens.

~~~
morsch
Phones and tablets just run all windows full screen, each on their own
workspace. A few let you split the screen in half and run one app each. Sounds
like a tiling window manager to me.

A few apps -- on Android anyway -- have a floating mode, where they occupy
some space over other apps, always on top. This is another thing tiling window
managers do.

~~~
jackalope
Indeed. In fact, that's one of the reasons I switched to Windows Phone 8: It
was the closest I could get to the linux+dwm environment where I do most of my
computing. Why would anyone want a desktop metaphor on a phone, complete with
tiny icons and illegible drop-shadowed text?

------
mariuolo
Quite frankly I don't care who arrives first, as long as we get there.

~~~
peatmoss
I always found the backlash against this project somewhat baffling. The
display server problem goes back a long ways. We've had a couple of distinct
groups of opinions: a) people who think X is just fine b) people who think
replacing X is a worthy task, and who've started to explore the topic in
earnest.

What we've been lacking was c) people who can articulate a pressingly urgent
use case where a new display server is on the critical path, AND have the
resources to code it up. Canonical is, as far as I know, the first in that
category.

I agree with the supposition that, IF Wayland/Westland represented a suitable
head start on meeting the goals that Canonical has with Mir, that Canonical
would do well to invest its resources there. Outside of Canonical, there has
been a lot of debate as to whether the "Wayland/Westland is the right
direction for Canonical" supposition is true.

At the end, I tend to give more weight Canonical's opinion in this matter.
They are, after all, urgently developing a project in which a new display
server is on the critical path. The risk in foregoing the head start offered
by Wayland/Westland is primarily on them.

From the vantage point of this casual observer, Mir has lit a fire for the
Wayland/Westland project. That's great! If unifying against a common threat is
what pushes the project along at a faster rate, that's okay. But I still tend
to think that Canonical is going to win this race by virtue of them having
something to strive for on the other side of building a display server.

~~~
jdub
Sure, but that's "the resources of Canonical" (more like a small amount of
Canonical's already relatively meagre development resources, on a project that
is not exactly a crucial enabler or breadwinner) vs. practically everyone else
in the Open Source industry and community.

~~~
peatmoss
In my experience, "practically everyone else in the Open Source industry and
community" only means the developers are N > 0\. I like to believe that N ->
Infinity, but I think very many projects N -> 0.

There are few open source projects where even one or two talented, dedicated,
full-time developers would not represent a substantial increase in labor.
There was just an article posted a day or two ago talking about how people
would be surprised if they knew how small some teams at Apple really were.

This isn't to disparage F/OSS development. I still believe in the development
model more than others. I just think we need to be realistic about project
resources. Open source isn't magic in this regard.

~~~
jdub
Unscientific, but:

    
    
      mir$ bzr log --include-merged | grep committer: | sed 's#.*<##' | sort -u | wc -l
      59
    

vs.

    
    
      wayland$ git log --format='%aN' | sort -u | wc -l
      105
    

(And there's some messiness in the bzr output that inflates the mir figure
somewhat.)

------
mike_ivanov
I bet that within 10 years none of these two will be relevant, yet X11 still
be hanging around.

~~~
orkoden
X11 will always be around as a client running under a more modern display
software. Kind of like how we're still running VT100 terminals on top a
graphical UI with mouse, sound and 3D graphics capabilities. Mac OS X has been
running X11 applications like that for more than a decade now. It works just
fine.
[http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/](http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/)

~~~
mike_ivanov
That's true, although it doesn't mean that Mir or Wayland will necessarily
stick as Mac OS window system did. It's a way too fast morphing landscape,
even for a 10-year long project. Mac is a relatively stable platform based on
a carefully curated ecosystem with predictable future, etc. Linux is not.

BTW, I really like your X11-VT100 analogy.

------
bobajeff
From the article it doesn't really sound like Wayland or Mir will be relevant.
It's far more likely everyone will skip the the display/surface/compositer go
straight down to EGL and GL.

~~~
talideon
If all you're doing is running one thing, and that one thing is in total
control of the screen and the input devices, sure, but once more than one
application needs to access them all at the same time, you need some kind of
mediator, and that's what the display server is for.

~~~
bobajeff
That makes sense from a system architecture perspective but will application
developer need to write in that language or can they just write in EGL and GL?

~~~
slavik81
There is no Wayland drawing language, and presumably no Mir drawing language.
However, there's no OpenGL 'createWindow' function.

To create a new window and draw something in it, you would need both.

------
tgandrews
Looks like they have lost their www DNS record.

> linuxvoice.com Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer: Name: linuxvoice.com Address: 104.28.6.18 Name:
linuxvoice.com Address: 104.28.7.18 > www.linuxvoice.com Server: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer: __* Can 't find www.linuxvoice.com: No answer

~~~
benev
Basically what happened is that we changed our wordpress theme, and it turns
out that the new one puts a bit more pressure on our server than the old one.
We used to be able to handle a top spot on hacker news, but this time our
server died on us.

We decided to switch to cloudflare to mitigate some of the load. This requires
changing DNS settings, and it seems that for some people, there's been a gap
when they haven't been able to access the page. This is of course a little
unfortunate. However, it does mean that other people can actually access the
page rather than just getting stuck loading.

It's all a bit hectic here at the moment. It's possible there's some other
problems that I haven't yet fully discovered.

------
fithisux
A "mine is bigger than yours" headline. I hope both are here to stay with an
Xming-like implementation of Xorg (even for Haiku-OS).

------
lockcompetition
The link appears broken for me. Is there a way to report that?

------
jbb555
I don't really want to use wayland or mir. I'd rather keep using the current
perfectly fine software.

~~~
scrollaway
This isn't relevant to users, it's relevant to developers. Getting rid of X11
is important, and if you don't know why it's not relevant to you.

~~~
cwyers
It's a big mistake to think that way. If you can't come up with a compelling
reason for users to upgrade, it's a lot harder to get the install base large
enough where developers can confidently switch over.

~~~
jiggy2011
Users will switch over when their distro starts using it by default, the same
as they would for a new version of the kernel , a new init system or any other
lower level software.

The fact is that the design of X is archaic and not well designed for the
needs of the modern era. The benefit to end users is that rich multimedia
software becomes much easier to develop for Linux so they get more of it.

