
XMir postponed in Ubuntu - ovis
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-October/037695.html
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SCdF
I really want Mir to die. Unless I'm misunderstanding the situation Wayland
vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux, and afaict Mir exists for
no technical reason; it exists because Canonical don't want to play in anyone
else's sandpit.

~~~
jcastro
> Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux

Not really. You know what other Linux doesn't ship Wayland, Mir, or X?

Android. And the world hasn't exploded.

~~~
Pxtl
Notice how few Linux OSS applications have been ported to Android. Where's
LibreOffice for android? Inkscape? Blender? Audacity? GIMP? Thunderbird?
Filezilla?

Obviously in most of those cases a naive port of the GUI would only be useful
for a large tablet with a keyboard and mouse attached. But still, the naive
port would be better than nothing.

The near-total lack of direct ports between Linux and Android (except for SDL-
based games) should tell you that this _does_ cause a problem.

~~~
jcastro
I think you're lumping platforms with kernels, they're not interchangeable
terms. "Linux" isn't a platform because no one has defined what "Linux" is
supposed to be.

Android and Ubuntu can be platforms because someone can say "An Android app
does these things" and then point to an SDK. Ubuntu is doing the same thing.

Anyone can take a Linux kernel and then build whatever userspace they want on
top of it. Android existing hasn't hurt Linux, it's the dominant mobile OS and
is bringing in hardware manufactures to work on the kernel.

Sure user space apps are different as you point out, but that's what happens
when you give people Lego blocks, not everyone is going to use the same
blocks.

~~~
Pxtl
This is splitting hairs. The mainstream desktop Linux distros all run a
similar stack of technology that provides a running environment for the major
desktop OSS projects I listed. They all brand themselves as Linux.

Yes, technically Linux is only the kernel, but being pedantic about it only
muddies up the conversation. When somebody says "this computer runs Linux"
they mean Gentoo/Fedora/Ubuntu/Whatever.

Everybody knows I meant "mainstream desktop Linux distro software". Correcting
that abbreviation adds nothing to the conversation.

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mindstab
Good, they aren't going to have a release that is a massive regression
(again). I was planning on skipping 13.10 because everything so far said it
would have worse performance and more bugs. OTOH it's a bit scary that their
release engineering is making big dramatic structural changes in X servers 3-4
weeks before launch. It should be in frozen locked down beta now... The real
solution was that XMir never should have been jammed into their release so
forceful while obviously so unready in the first place... Still this is better
than launching with it anyways, so half marks Canonical. But this is nothing
like the rock solid stability you provided in Beta and Alpha last decade.

~~~
Steltek
Why not? It worked for PulseAudio, right? Or how about the upgrade between the
last two LTS releases?

I can't understand Canonical's downright eagerness to force broken software
out the door just to appease their roadmap and rigid release schedule. It's
pushed as the newbie friendly distro but behaves more like Gentoo when it's
time to upgrade.

I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The
track record just does not support that choice.

~~~
jcastro
> I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The
> track record just does not support that choice.

Wow seriously? Wikipedia, Dropbox, Hulu, NTT, ATT, HP Cloud (Guest AND Host),
Comcast. Netflix is moving it's entire infrastructure to Ubuntu. Hate on linux
sound all you want but Ubuntu Server is awesome.

~~~
j_s
This is the Ubuntu equivalent of saying Windows 2000 is great in response to
complaints about Windows ME.

~~~
vidarh
Grandparent specifically said installing Ubuntu onto production _servers_
makes him cringe.

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krakensden
Everyone thinks replacing X.org is a clear and obvious win until they try and
do it.

The only reason to think differently about Wayland is that a plurality of
X.org developers seem to be involved.

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comex
Does Canonical have _any_ coherent explanation for why they are still pressing
on with their own incompatible rewrite of a display server when a perfectly
good one was already in development?

~~~
acabal
My guess is that they're doing it so they can have control over the pace of
development and features. I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days
Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what
Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity.

Mir might be his attempt to control the stack in anticipation of getting
burned again. After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish
environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to
be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of
the product. What if he wants feature Z included in the next dev cycle to
support cool new mobile hardware? With Wayland, he'd have to play politics
with the developers and pray. With Mir, he can just order it.

Not to say that I think it's a good decision. In fact I think it's one of the
most ruinous decisions for the Linux community that Canonical could have
possibly made. Graphics support has been the biggest thorn in Linux's side for
years, and dividing the ecosystem at a time when Valve is poised to finally
revolutionize things is pretty despicable. But I can see the short-sighted
business logic behind it.

~~~
Jasper_
> I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he
> felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to
> become, so he went his own way with Unity.

As someone who was there from the beginning, this is false. The hackfest where
some of the initial goals of GNOME Shell were planned out in 2008 at Canonical
offices. We were wondering why some of the Canonical guys who were listed as
RSVPing weren't there... until we went to lunch and saw that they were having
their own private meeting. I don't think we'll ever know what was discussed --
perhaps their indicator system.

Canonical employees were participating in the Boston hackfests in 2008 and
2009 and we welcomed their presence; they actually had a lot of good ideas
which we integrated. I, personally, never had any issues with Canonical's work
and I think all of my coworkers would agree. I'm really not sure where this
perceived "us vs. them" animosity came from, but I never felt it personally.

They're still absolutely welcome to contribute back to GNOME if they want to
(and, to be fair, some still do).

~~~
SEJeff
I was at the Boston summit in 2010 (for the snowy hackfest mainly) and
distinctly remember some unpleasant and very public back and forth between (I
believe) Jon William McCann and a Canonical employee who was trying to troll
shell and was rightfully called out for their foolishness. I got a _distinct_
feeling of us vs them, but that was in 2010.

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quink
But I'm confused now!

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_with_mir_instead_of_x/)
said the following three months ago:

> Shuttleworth said he has been running Mir on his own laptop, an "all-Intel"
> Dell XPS, for two weeks, and that barring a few minor glitches, the system
> feels smoother than it did before.

Surely it must have been ready to ship in a major release of the most popular
Linux distribution given that!

There were only minor glitches and it's run a whole two weeks on the damn
founder's personal laptop! How could it have been declared not ready to ship
three months, such a vast period of time, later!

/s

Please grow up, Canonical. Also, Wayland.

~~~
YokoZar
The main problem area blocking the release is multi-monitor support. A
regression there means it will break for some users, even though those who
don't use this feature might have a huge improvement (such as mark did).

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shmerl
I still hope at some point Canonical will come to their senses and will dump
Mir for Wayland. Otherwise this mess will only increase in the future.

A related question. What will SteamOS use after X.org? Wayland or Mir?

~~~
mackal
A little birdy informed me that SteamOS is based on Ubuntu, they didn't go
into more details besides saying it was a dumb choice. I would assume its
based on X.org since neither Wayland nor Mir are mature enough.

~~~
epsylon
> it was a dumb choice On the contrary, I think it's a great choice. Ubuntu
> has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially
> for unexperienced users. It's not a coincidence that it's been adopted by
> many big cos (Google comes to mind) or administrations. In particular,
> hardware support will be key to the success of SteamOS and there are only
> few contenders that compete with the friendliness of Ubuntu (especially a
> Valve-customized one).

~~~
forgottenpass
>Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience,
especially for unexperienced users.

Does anyone _not_ expect Valve to throw that all away in favor of big picture
mode? Unity, if it does ship in Steam OS by default, will be the under-the-
hood interface.

~~~
mackal
They will most likely use a much more light weight WM underneath (say Openbox)
instead of Unity. If you don't have a WM handling some things and just start
steam in BP mode your cursor stays around :P

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Mikeb85
They should have stuck with Wayland. Gnome 3.10 supports Wayland, and Fedora
20 will ship with Wayland as an option. openSUSE 13.1 will also ship with
Gnome 3.10, so getting Wayland working there shouldn't be hard, and I'm sure
the Arch and Gentoo communities will have it working very soon too.

~~~
Jasper_
As a GNOME developer, there's still a lot of work to do. It's mentioned as a
tech preview for a reason. We'll work on shipping with full Wayland support by
3.12, but don't expect it to be fully usable or represent the final state of
Wayland support.

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methodin
People say competition is a good thing, which I agree with. Competition is
arguably the lynchpin of capitalism that keeps us from a slew of monopolies in
each market.

It appears however that personal vendettas trump that sentiment based on the
posts here.

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codex
Canonical is desperate to differentiate and this make money. However, when all
the code is open and free, there is no way to differentiate for the better.
It's like selling insurance. Everyone's product is the same.

~~~
jared314
A new display server does not differentiate an OS in anyway that would
remotely make money. It is more likely they tried to use a technical solution
to solve a non-technical problem (display server consensus on an old
architecture).

~~~
rodgerd
A new display server under GPL3 with mandatory CLA would be an excellent way
of making money if you got enough leverage that you could start charging
hardware vendors if they wanted a private copy so they could avoid disclosing
their driver modifications.

It's same relicensing model MySQL made money with.

~~~
lucian1900
Except no one is shopping around for a display server. Lots of people were
(and still are) shopping around for a DB.

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devx
I wonder if this has anything to do with Intel's decision to stop supporting
Mir. Might've set them back just enough so they won't be ready to ship it on
time for 13.10.

~~~
mhw
Your question is answered in the Q&A page linked from the email:

Has the recent revert from Intel triggered this decision?

A: No. It is completely unrelated. This decision was made by our engineering
management team and was based solely on the current quality feature set we
defined for XMir, independent of any discussions with Intel.

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jbeard4
Does anyone know which graphics cards Mir is intended to support on release?

