
Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir - dz0ny
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec
======
acabal
Maybe this is a good idea, I don't know about X/Wayland enough to say. But it
worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. What I like
about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common
underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and
improving those underpinnings. It's also less knowledge to have to keep in
your head for system administration stuff. (Which is still necessary in
Ubuntu, regardless of what the "it just works for me" people say.)

Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I
would much rather know _GNU/Linux_ , not _Ubuntu_. Now Ubuntu is standing
alone with Compiz, Unity, Upstart, Launchpad, and Mir, all pretty fundamental
pieces of the core system. In a decade, will switching from Ubuntu to Debian
be as big of a culture shock as switching from Windows to Linux?

~~~
kunai
> _What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a
> lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community
> fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings_

Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc.
all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly
integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly
more open OS X, which isn't good at all.

~~~
jjcm
Standards are great and all, but holding on to those standards is what's
keeping back the UX of linux. Gnome3 is familiar, but very dated. X is
supported by all, but it's a tangled mess that everyone hates.

Yes Ubuntu is straying from the pack, but I'd rather have them stray and the
rest follow when they find something good then have the entire linux community
sit in the same place they have been for years. Regardless of what path Ubuntu
takes, I think it will be good for the linux community to have that diversity.

~~~
zobzu
Yeah, like Unity _cough_ or upstart _cough_.

RH is doing similar stuff, although they're more deeply involved, and while I
don't especially like how they impose some of their technology, at least it's
_generally_ well though out.

~~~
signed0
Upstart is available in the Debian package repos, and it was used for a while
by Red Hat before they switched to Systemd.

~~~
zobzu
Fedora package != RHEL defaults. Debian package != Debian defaults.

RHEL 6.4 still uses systemv init, in fact.

~~~
lmz
EL6 uses upstart[1], the SysV init scripts are using the rc compatibility.

[1]: [https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-
US/Red_Hat_Enter...](https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-
US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Technical_Notes/deployment.html)

------
pilgrim689
I don't understand all the negative reactions. Canonical is recognizing
various problems in making GNU/Linux mainstream. They are then innovating at a
deeper level (fixing root causes rather than duct-taping) to ultimately
attempt to really attract the layman to a mobile or desktop GNU/Linux distro.
Devs don't need to target Mir if they don't want to, Linux users can switch to
another Debian if they don't like it, and the Layman discovers that Linux can
possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS. Can someone explain to me why this is all
so horrible?

~~~
jlgreco
> _the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS._

Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux
customers or something?

We should let them be. Laymen will invariably be better served by Microsoft or
Apple, trying to win them over in some sort of misguided drive to "win"
market-share seems foolish. Linux should focus on it's niche, and Microsoft
and Apple theirs.

This market-share envy makes no sense to me. Does Artic Cat stare with envy at
Ford's userbase and expend effort trying to get suburban parents to drive
their kids to school on snowmobiles? That would just be silly.

~~~
achiang
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Ubuntu's raison d'etre, which is to
bring Free (libre) software to the world.

Except the rest of the (consumer) world doesn't value libre as a first-class
feature. They want the shiny.

The way we get to bring our values to the world is to be commercially
relevant. Because otherwise, hardware vendors don't care about you, ISVs
ignore you, app developers target other platforms, and so forth.

Market share isn't the end goal. It's a means to the end.

~~~
jlgreco
Seems dishonest and manipulative to me. Con a bunch of people into adopting
something that doesn't really fit their needs, is just shiny, so that you can
use them as leverage... that is not something I am interested in.

Meanwhile all of those unskilled users are not without a cost. Free software
support infrastructure is not set up to handle that many unskilled users. If
Canonical is going to be giving all of those people 3rd party support
themselves, that is all well and good, but it seems to me they tend to punt
the ball.

~~~
achiang
The entire reason why desktop Linux has been a failure is exactly because it
does not fit the needs of most people. And for that audience, "shiny" is
equally important as "featureful".

In the modern marketplace, you can't choose either/or. It has to be both.

Ubuntu wants to do both _and additionally_ add libre.

The strawman fallacy you inferred from my statement has the additional fallacy
of incorrect causality.

People are initially attracted to Ubuntu for a variety of reasons, and we hope
to keep them because we are fit for purpose, not for whatever ideological
reason or niche feature, and certainly not due to any sort of con job.

Desktop Ubuntu has failed to reach that critical mass of users to be taken
seriously by industry (our good friends at Valve notwithstanding), and the
only logical place to jumpstart the install base is the mobile world.

The mobile market is brutally competitive. Ubuntu will succeed or fail on its
own merits, not because of any dishonest manipulation of innocent users.

~~~
jlgreco
Has desktop Linux been a failure? By what measure, adoption of people who are
not in it's niche market? Would it stop being a "failure" if we got a bunch of
laymen using it?

Compare community desktop linux distros with community distros of something
more oriented towards the masses... say.. Android.

The Debian Project is a well oiled machine, coherent and consistent.
Everything has a well defined process. Technically capable users don't have to
sort through piles of crap to get work done.

Cyanogenmod on the other hand is an utter shitfest. Standard operating
procedure there is wading through clusterfucked forums looking for
undocumented unofficial fixes (in prebuild binaries mind, no source) in
threads thousands of posts long filled with idiots saying _"hurr durr, I
dropped my phone in the toilet, now this patch doesn't work"_. They cannot
handle the size of their technologically illiterate community, and _everyone_
attempting to use their software, technical or otherwise, suffers as a result.
(This isn't even _touching_ the issue of shittier hardware support than you
would ever expect to see with desktop linux...)

If piles of unwashed masses were _really_ what desktop Linux is "missing",
then community maintained Android distributions should, far from being a
nightmare, be the promised land. This is plainly not the case.

~~~
achiang
You keep putting up strawmen.

Show me the desktop Linux equivalent of Android, not Cyanogenmod. It doesn't
exist - and you can measure that failure with any number of metrics.

If Ubuntu can achieve that type of success _and_ protect the freedom of
_users_ with the GPL (instead of the permissive BSD model for hardware makers)
then we will have accomplished something in the world.

~~~
jlgreco
You have missed the point. Show me the Android equivalent of Debian.

Show me an Android project, with all of the unskilled users that come with it,
that is _anywhere_ near as organized as the Debian Project. Show me that
legions of unskilled users have allowed this Android project to achieve
hardware compatibility at all comparable to what Debian achieves on the
desktop.

Such a project _does not exist_. I assert that it does not exist in no small
part _because_ they have too many unskilled users, _and_ because hardware
support does not materialize as soon as you reach some sort of "critical mass"
of unskilled users.

Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots. Only corporations that
are prepared to _completely_ disregard community involvement are capable of
wielding an idiot userbases. Canonical is neither up to that task nor does it
even appear to be pretending to be. Why? Probably because the lunatics run the
asylum.

~~~
mattkevan
_Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux
customers or something?_

 _Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots._

Wow. The level of arrogance and elitism on display here is breathtaking.

This is why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. Not the fact that it's
incompatible with most mainstream software, not the fact that it's low profile
or the fact that most Linux desktops look and function like Windows' retarded
younger brother – but because a tiny minority of the otherwise hugely
welcoming community set themselves up as some sort of entitled priesthood and
actively discourage 'idiot users' from getting involved.

New users, even idiot ones, are good. Yes, they bring problems and stupid
questions. Everyone has to start somewhere. But more people involved means
more investment and helps challenge entrenched assumptions about how things
should work. Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing
things down.

Why shouldn't everyone be able to use an approachable, thoughtfully designed
system that 'just works' and yet shares our values of freedom, community and
open source?

~~~
sixbrx
> Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing things
> down.

Except in practice, it almost always seems to. Which is why I don't and can't
do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on
Android, or an iPad.

~~~
mattkevan
> Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of
> nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.

That's about picking the right tool for the job, not dumbing down.

It's like complaining that a trowel is a dumbed down shovelling device because
it can't make any significant headway with digging a massive trench.

That said, I develop Drupal sites locally on my jailbroken iPad and it's
pretty nifty to have access to a full development environment on something
that portable.

------
tiles
From the MirSpec at <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec>:

"Why Not Wayland / Weston?

An obvious clarification first: Wayland is a protocol definition that defines
how a client application should talk to a compositor component. It touches
areas like surface creation/destruction, graphics buffer
allocation/management, input event handling and a rough prototype for the
integration of shell components. However, our evaluation of the protocol
definition revealed that the Wayland protocol suffers from multiple problems,
including:

The input event handling partly recreates the X semantics and is thus likely
to expose similar problems to the ones we described in the introductory
section. The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged
from our perspective and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior
defined in the protocol. However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at
standardizing the communication between clients and the display server
component is very sensible and useful, but it didn't fit our requirements and
we decided to go for the following architecture w.r.t. to protocol-
integration:

* A protocol-agnostic inner core that is extremely well-defined, well-tested and portable. * An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols.

In summary, we have not chosen Wayland/Weston as our basis for delivering a
next-generation user experience as it does not fulfill our requirements
completely. More to this, with our protocol- and platform-agnostic approach,
we can make sure that we reach our goal of a consistent and beautiful user
experience across platforms and device form factors. However, Wayland support
could be added either by providing a Wayland-specific frontend implementation
for our display server or by providing a client-side implementation of
libwayland that ultimately talks to Mir."

------
munchor
>This is the worst path Canonical could have possibly chosen. Now developers
across all different toolkits and applications, from Gtk+ to Wine, will need
to maintain massive patchsets to integrate with Ubuntu. Either that or run in
a rootless X window in "legacy" mode.

>This will not end well for interoperability, for developers, or for the wider
Linux ecosystem. Bad times.

That comment on OMG! Ubuntu! is making me uncomfortable with the consequences
this might have for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I am not sure about how far I can
trust that comment, but the Phoronix article[1] explains it better:

>Canonical developers will make to see that applications relying upon Qt/QML,
GTK3, XUL, etc will be able to use Mir in an "out of the box" manner. The
legacy X support will come from an in-session root-less X Server.

I would, though, like to know more about the consequences for this. First of
all, we know that Unity will be much faster, since this thing needs to run on
phones too and Unity will actually be a "real thing" instead of just a Window
Manager (Compiz) plugin.

>Isn't a point of FOSS that people can all contribute to one major project
instead of reinventing the wheel?

That is another comment on OMG! Ubuntu! and I completely agree with it. Sure,
freedom of choice is great, but why not use Wayland, really? It was designed
from scratch to work for everybody.

[1]:
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxN...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNzI)

~~~
zanny
I'm personally not _too_ worried here. The thing is both Wayland and Mir will
be able to run X on top of them, so currently _all_ available GUI programs
will still work.

What matters is the "winner". They will both hit mainstream usage, we will see
which one is easier to develop for, and that one will take off. If Mir's
claims of fixing input / specialization issues in Wayland comes to fruition,
then it will probably win. If Mir hits like Unity, or atrophies like Upstart,
then Wayland will probably win.

The problem is his Wayland fails everyone can switch to Mir. If Mir proves
weaker, we are stuck with a more fragmented desktop space because Canonical
doesn't change their minds on these things.

------
ChuckMcM
This is awesome! I really can't wait. Having been dealing with the drm/kms
stuff to try to build applications "near the metal" on small devices has been
painful painful painful. Just too many pots, each with their own sous chef.
Someone to put some structure around that and get the GPU folks in line makes
so much sense.

------
hazov
For those that are curious this is a good diagram by Alison Chaiken about the
two major ways of the architecture of Linux graphics:

<http://she-devel.com/Linux_Android_Graphics_Stacks.svg>

I believe Mir will just be a custom tailored SurfaceFlinger, I just do not
understand why Canonical will not use SurfaceFlinger.

EDIT: Maybe because SurfaceFlinger is built with OpenGLES in mind? I don't
really know.

~~~
sandGorgon
I have this question as well. Especially since they have already done so much
work around Android for Ubuntu touch, why not simply build, what will
essentially be desktop Android with a Unity Shell.

------
otterley
I notice that rasterization to non-display devices (e.g. printers) isn't
mentioned in the proposal at all. This was a serious weakness of X11 and I'm
surprised it's not discussed. In mainstream consumer OSes, such capability is
part of the basic graphics toolkits (GDI, Carbon).

If Canonical is serious about attracting mainstream Linux adoption, this is
going to have to be addressed from the start.

------
prodigal_erik
Remoting over a network with latency is not even an afterthought; none of
those words appear in this spec at all. I'm worried that a new display system
might start getting traction in the industry while assuming there's only one
computer in the world I care about _and_ that I'm sitting in front of it,
because that would be a huge step backwards.

~~~
chmike
This exactly what worried me after reading this anoucement. If there is no
remote display capability, it will be a regression.

~~~
cdmckay
Why would it be a regression?

------
BruceIV
On the one hand, this looks like one good way to get rid of the massive bag of
hurt that is X; on the other, seriously Canonical? Re-inventing another huge
chunk of the stack just because? NIH syndrome much?

~~~
crististm
Pardon my ignorance, but what is wrong with X, anyway?

~~~
metachris
Besides of being too slow to run on current phones, and not natively
supporting 3D acceleration, these are the reasons mentioned in the article:

"With respect to shell development (Unity), three major shortcomings of the X
stack prevent us from delivering the user experience (f’n’f) we have in mind:

* X shares a lot of system state across process boundaries. This is obviously not a problem in itself but a system-level UI that is meant to provide a beautiful and consistent user experience is likely to require tight control over the overall system state.

* X's input model is complex and allows applications to spoof on input events they do not own. On the one hand, this raises serious security concerns, especially regarding mobile platforms. On the other hand, adjusting and extending X's input model is difficult and supporting features like input event batching and compression, motion event prediction together with associated power-saving strategies or flexible synchronization schemes for aligning input event delivery and rendering operations is (too) complex.

* The compositor hierarchy ends on the session level, and no tight integration into the system from boot time onward is available. For that reason, there is a visible glitch when transitioning the system from a VT-level to the graphical shell level."

~~~
benjiweber
There may be plenty of issues with X, but it runs fine on the n900 and n9.
It's not too slow to run on current phones.

~~~
dthunt
Also, it says something when #3 on your big list of complaints about X is that
switching graphics modes when starting X is a major problem that needs to be
fixed.

~~~
iso-8859-1
It is not only an X issue, it is a system level issue. But I guess it is
mostly irrelevant now, since we have KMS.

------
gvalkov
Just wanted to mention that the news of Mir has hit wayland's mailing list[1].
I'm very curious to see what the wayland developers think of all this.

A lot of work has already went into wayland and in making things work with it
(gtk3, qt5, clutter etc). This is truly an ambitious project and I doubt that
ubuntu engineers would needlessly want to write all of this from scratch if
there weren't legitimate shortcomings in wayland's architecture.

Personally, I'm looking forward to my wayland powered, fedora 20 desktop
running the yet to be invented WMonad tiling window compositor.

[1]: [http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-
devel/2013-Mar...](http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-
devel/2013-March/007770.html)

------
lucian1900
Wtf? "We don't like Wayland because of ... reasons, let's build our own stack
from scratch!"

~~~
rlpb
Why don't you address the specific technical reasons given in TFA?

~~~
lucian1900
None of those few reasons are particularity compelling and they could be
addressed with Wayland just as well.

------
hamax
I don't hate this decision. I probably won't upgrade as soon as it comes out,
but in my opinion linux ecosystem needs competition in the display server
segment.

If they screw it up there are plenty distros to choose from.

------
binarycrusader
If this is going to have any real hope of replacing X it also needs to be
licensed as liberally as X is, otherwise, it's doomed in many commercial
sectors. (Current mir license appears to be GPLv3.)

------
sandGorgon
This is Ubuntu's "Bada" move - it is scared of being assimilated by Android
that it is forgetting that it can truly innovate in the UX and not by building
walled gardens around display managers.

Ubuntu already has significant investment in Surfaceflinger/Android via its
Touch vertical. It has also started migrating to QT/QML for its shell (which
work really well on Android). There is a significant opportunity to innovate
on UX (like Blackberry Z10), rather than throw away the ecosystem that would
come with adopting an Android core.

Yesterday, I couldnt join a GoToMeeting using Ubuntu. But just after, I did it
in less than 2 minutes by using an app oumy Android device. That is a huge
ecosystem, that I want to use on my desktop (I dont know how the desktop UX
for a touch app will work, but I hope it will).

I say that Ubuntu, Google and Valve should sit together and come up with a
graphics+sound backend that will work together. And let me play Half Life 3 on
my phone and desktop simultaneously !

------
AnthonBerg
Given my bad experience during the past years of Ubuntu breaking things in
Debian and inventing poor software by themselves, my estimation is that
they're not smart enough to pull this off.

~~~
hollerith
am curious how Ubuntu broke things in Debian. were Debian maintainers too
ready to accept changes from Ubuntu?

~~~
AnthonBerg
Ah! Oops! I meant break things FROM debian, as in got code from Debian and
broke it in Ubuntu, or didn't pull fixes from Debian into Ubuntu for years.

My apologies! I'm not a native English speaker :( and sometimes I think I am
smarter than I am :)

~~~
TheCowboy
What did they break?

~~~
AnthonBerg
mdadm and associated init scripts was the dealbreaker for me

they broke the initscripts so array assembly didn't work correctly - not even
the same as the installed man page stated

they had mdadm version 2.x (has significant flaws) for YEARS after mdadm 3.x
was accepted into debian - YEARS - even after multiple users making clear what
the problem was in bug reports

a user even made a patch and a ppa which fixed things but still they didn't
pick up on that for a year + as i recall

and they broke/removed debian's PERFECT support for installation onto md raid

other stuff i've honestly forgotten but i swear there was more

oh! oh! wait, also the STOPPING THE BOOT PROCESS TO WAIT FOR YOU TO PRESS A
KEY if a drive needed an fsck!!!!! what the f....

(don't understand why you were downvoted, good question)

------
qznc
So, Wayland vs Mir will be the next Gnome3 vs Unity?

~~~
insertnickname
Except that people actually support Wayland and everyone is angry at Canonical
about Mir.

------
scolex
in the past when ubuntu was still "linux for human beings" they did great job
polishing the linux and providing good linux experience. They were very good
improvers.

but then they decided to became inventors. But they don't have strong
engineering background and their products were trash.

upstart never provided advanced parallelism and was surpassed by systemd

Top menu and indicators rely on d-bus -- really stupid idea and misuse of
technology

they abandon mutter+clutter for closed gl-canvas rendering library + compiz to
be used in unity. Now is mutter+clutter far more advanced.

Now they want to change wayland for mir? are they serious? They are not good
at inventing things. They will just make linux fragmentation much worst. It's
really problematic to make good drivers and gpu companies can't spend money
and people on different linux platforms.

ubuntu became from "linux for human beings" to "crappy mac-os like for poor"

------
caycep
Also - kind of a noob question but: my assumption is all the recent ubuntu
controversy is over ubuntu desktop. Does this affect the ubuntu server distro
at all? Especially since I am trying to learn how to create a well provisioned
ubuntu server vm for use with linode deployments...

~~~
signed0
It shouldn't, Ubuntu Server doesn't currently include X.

------
sneak
> X has a long and successful history and it has served the purposes of both
> system level and application level UI well for more than 3 decades.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

~~~
dubcanada
I kinda laughed when I read your comment.

------
desireco42
While I agree with most of you who says they are worried by this development,
I understand and welcome this direction Ubuntu is taking, almost making their
own, not flavor but unique OS. Which is what people said HP should have done.

It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat
inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on
ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows. If Ubuntu manage to pull this off,
and I think they deserve all our support in that, we will get inspiration for
all the open source projects as well as good codebase they can fork and work
with. I am not expert in licencing, but anything they accomplish can't be bad
for the open source movement.

My 2c.

~~~
keithpeter
" _It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is
somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use
firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows._ "

What do you find wrong with Firefox on Ubuntu exactly? I'm not challenging
just interested. I use Win7/IE9 and Ubuntu1204/Firefox 19 most days.

~~~
desireco42
Pages are loading more slowly, you can notice lagging of some actions. As a
developer I am used to going fast through things, so when things are slow, it
is noticable. Maybe it is due to pluggins, I don't know, I just know it is
surprisingly slower.

Under every other circumstance, I would prefer linux/ubuntu to any other
machine. I was using linux for several years as primary dev machine. At the
moment I am on a mac, even though I have both linux and win machines as well.

------
doublextremevil
from Wayland creator Kristian Høgsberg:

" things they claim wayland/weston input can't be extended to support:

"... adjusting and extending X's input model is difficult and supporting
features like input event batching and compression, motion event prediction
together with associated power-saving strategies or flexible synchronization
schemes for aligning input event delivery and rendering operations is (too)
complex."

is already implemented and working in weston today...﻿"

<https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts>

------
lee
Those who are complaining that Ubuntu is diverging from most other Linux
distros forget that this is the nature of open source software and
competition.

Part of the success of open source software is that it's highly evolutionary.
Good successful projects attract a following and get better. For this to
happen, you have to have choice and diversity. There has to be competing
flavors, libraries, and distros all vying for market share.

What Ubuntu is doing is great for us all. Providing more alternatives in the
Linux ecosystem than just relying on X/Wayland/Whatever.

------
ElliotH
Competition is good.

Ubuntu seems to have their reasons not to want to use Wayland. Maybe Mir is
awesome. Then I can move to it. If it's not so awesome then like Unity and
Upstart I can ignore it.

Seems to me the enemy here is the old fashioned clunky X server. Good. Two
armies fighting the same target at least eliminates that target before they
start fighting each other.

Besides, if they both end up having support in all the major toolkits and they
both have an X server fallback, then we should be able to meet in the middle
somewhere eventually.

------
debian69
Ubuntu is like an aneoba they cant stop splitting.

~~~
ihsw
More like a virus.

------
kunai
I suppose it's time to switch to Fedora, now, even though I've been holding
out for as long as humanly possible.

This just pushes me over the edge.

~~~
dfc
Why not Debian?

~~~
kunai
Debian stable tends to be too stable for my tastes; Fedora is much more
bleeding edge. It's just a matter of preference, really.

~~~
csense
Fedora? Bleeding edge? I've heard that Red Hat is what's holding a lot of
people back in the Python world, because their Python version is so ancient.

~~~
Symmetry
Fedora is bleeding edge, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not.

------
caycep
The other possibility - I just saw an article on phoronix noting the adoption
of the Android window server layer (SurfaceFlinger or something like that) on
ubuntu mobile. Not familiar at all with android underpinnings, but would that
be another alternative to Mir? i.e. more modern window server, actively
developed by Google dollars, etc?

~~~
zanny
SurfaceFlinger is missing a lot of essential desktop display protocol
components, like native windowing, chrome allocation, it only uses openGL ES,
and isn't environment agnostic at all.

Also, completely opinionated, but after reading some of the SF code in the
AOSP, it seems like just as much of a mess as X is implementation wise. It is
all over the place.

------
VLM
No one has made the obvious comparison in the comments to ipv4 vs ipv6? The
main issue with "yet another graphics protocol" is islanding. Right now all my
"linux" boxes are more or less intercompatible. I can ssh -X whatever mythtv-
setup and get the config GUI from a server that doesn't even have a monitor
(not even sure if it has a graphics card?)

Now I / we will inevitably have three little not too compatible islands of X,
wayland, mir, who knows.

My primary interest as an end user, because the machines "I do stuff on" are
multiple huge headless servers and virtual images running on them, is network
transparency. As long as a Mir keyboard/mouse/monitor can connect to a "real"
system and give my my X when necessary, in a VNC like window or whatever if
necessary, I'll be OK.

Connectivity demands go both ways. If my refrigerator ends up running Ubuntu
for its user interface, I'd really like to be able to remotely connect to it
to mess with it.

~~~
stephen_g
What comparison to IPv4 vs IPv6? There are very few parallels...

I guess you could say that X and Wayland are like IPv4 and IPv6, where we
strive for total migration to the new, better protocol, but in the meantime
you can have a dual-stack setup with both that works fine. But it's not like
anyone is coming in with a competitor to IPv6, so the analogy completely
breaks down...

------
JoachimSchipper
Relevant: <https://lwn.net/Articles/524606/>, OpenBSD complaining about modern
X becoming less and less portable. Ubuntu, of course, is always willing to
turn the incompatibility to 11.

------
csense
What does this mean for Ubuntu-based distributions that offer a more
traditional look and feel, like Linux Mint? I jumped ship for Linux Mint when
Ubuntu shoved Unity down everyone's throats.

I like the balance Ubuntu strikes between good hardware support, recent
packages, proprietary graphics support, and the "it just works" factor.

I just want all of that without the Unity mess. Unity might be good on a cell
phone, but it was really crashy and impossible to do any work, because every
time I've attempted to use Unity, I couldn't figure out how to do the simplest
things with the GUI, and ended up switching within days.

It sounds like the new window manager will only support Unity.

------
mhw
More interesting stuff from one of the developers here:
[http://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-
envis...](http://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-
as-a-new-home/)

------
lsiebert
Either it will be better, worse, or a mixed bag.

If it's better, Then they have improved the ecosystem, and the developers and
users will follow. If it's worse, then we can hope they will switch back, or
they will lose users/developers.

The concern is a mixed bag... splitting development on something that may or
may not ultimately win.

But mixed bags lead to innovation more than having one true way. Ideas from
Mir and Wayland and X can lead to all three of them improving more then if
only one or two of them were viable. However the lack of focus may slow
individual development.

TL/DR Worst case is still not horrible, so long as Canonical recognizes it.

------
yk
It appears that any sufficiently widely adopted Unix becomes a OS of its own.
Examples include OSX, Android and increasingly Ubuntu.

( I have a wonderful proof for this, unfortunately HN does not allow to write
into the margins.)

------
X4
######### We need Borg efficiency!!

SAR - We need fast driver development using safe and automatic "Template-
Based" build systems. There is a lot GNU/Linux can learn from Embedded Systems
development.

------
elteto
Wow. The sheer level of FUD and negativity that you can find on these comments
is just mind blowing. It seems that most of it (with a few knowledgeable
exceptions) is coming from folks who don't know what they are talking about
and have never probably developed graphical applications for Linux. They can't
elaborate a single technical reason as to why they dislike whatever it is they
dislike, yet they still jump on the bashing theme du jour (which nowadays
seems to be Canonical).

~~~
asveikau
Your description sounds a lot like the bashing of X itself.

As someone who is happy with an X desktop I don't entirely get it. I
understand that some of the folks doing Wayland have experience hacking on X
but it seems a lot like wheel reinvention. X may have some warts but it's hard
to argue that it's totally broken; it's also come a long way in the last 10
years or so, I'd say in testament to its ability to be extended. I think
innovation in the toolkits (to catch up with where X is today) sounds like a
better deal.

------
ac
Does it mean we won't be able to use "ssh -X" on Ubuntu in future?

~~~
zanny
You can't ssh -X on Wayland, either.

If it is running an X server on top (and Mir says it will, and Wayland can)
you can probably still do ssh -X.

------
mixedbit
It it going to be compatible with existing window managers for X or does the
change mean that Ubuntu will work only with Gnome or window managers developed
from scratch for Mir?

------
Someone
Anybody know what this will be licensed under? I would think (L)GPL, but
<https://launchpad.net/mir> isn't clear:

    
    
       "Licences:
        GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source
       (Boost Software License - Version 1.0)
        Commercial subscription expires 2022-09-24
        This project’s licence has not been reviewed."

~~~
mzs
COPYING indicates gpl3, main.cpp does as well, and so does the readme.

------
trotsky
Did I read that correctly, there is no plan to build GTK+ bindings - they are
going to qt based dekstop applications?

Or do they expect gnome to port to mir? Unless they already worked that out it
doesn't seem too likely as this amounts to a direct shot at them.

If Ubuntu is suddenly not going to have any gtk applications available it is
going to be a very foreign environment to lots of its current users.

~~~
unwind
Not sure, they do say:

    
    
        Application authors relying on Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL etc. should not be required to perform additional porting as we will work on providing Mir integration for the most prominent toolkit choices.
    

Maybe they've just decided to take Qt first, and that's why there's already a
project for this.

I'm a bit confused, I thought GTK+ did its rendering through Cairo, which
would mean that a Cairo backend is what's needed. Not 100% sure about this
though, I don't track GTK+ at a low level these days.

------
mtgx
It seems they are rewriting Unity, which I think is great. Unity is too slow.
It should never be used for mobile devices as it is.

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec>

~~~
zanny
What I don't get is why Canonical doesn't just implement Unity as a Kwin
frontend if they are rewriting it. They obviously know Compiz has no support
anymore, and if they are switching the bulk of their projects to qt, it seems
like they have a compositor just kind of sitting there waiting to be adopted.

------
morsch
They also announced the successor to Unity will be based on Qt/QML...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5320633>

------
teeja
Considering that Plasma (on my install) uses 100MB of RAM to work its wonders
(I have no idea what or how), that alone makes me suspect there might be a
better way.

------
st3fan
"Tailored towards an EGL/GL(ES) world" - this is obviously to make it easier
for Canonical to run on (mobile) devices.

------
vsync
> "beautiful"... "beautiful"... "beautiful".

Really?

------
dakimov
The worst thing is using C++ for a GUI engine. Don't do that mistake again!

The code looks quite weak at the first glance, but at least not so ugly as
average open-source code.

The architecture solutions seem a bit weak too, even weaker than a GUI engine
I have written being a junior developer.

Overall, their code seems to be written by a junior developer.

Seems to be too ambitious so far.

The problem is that it is actually really hard to make a proper GUI engine. It
requires enormous experience and amount of expertise, like you can come up
with something decent after building a few your own engines and closely
analyzing existing solutions.

------
popee
Or just install mint ;-)

~~~
grimborg
I tried Mint with Cinnamon a few months ago. I normally use Gnome classic with
XMonad as the window manager. Some things that are in Gnome were missing in
Cinnamon (bluetooth settings was an example IIRC, but I don't remember the
details), and I ended up with a mess of Gnome and Cinnamon, having some apps
installed twice (the Cinnamon version and the Gnome version). Other things
required some manual work, like integrating Dropbox with Nemo. I ended up
going back to Ubuntu.

