Mir vs. Wayland & effect on Linux "Ecosystem"?

Linux is full of companies/capitalism:
- Novell(Attachmate, a company in which Microsoft has representation) : (indirectly)openSUSE
- Red Hat : RHEL/(indirectly)Fedora
- HP (as a partner of Debian)
- Opera/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo as sponsors of Mint
- Sun (historically)
- IBM

If you're using Google stuff (including Youtube) or Virtualbox/MySQL etc. (Oracle), that's all "capitalism". Personally I think Canonical are just the whipping boys of the moment. That's not to say I agree with everything it does - far from it. But stuff like RMS's call to bullying ("We need to teach Canonical a lesson") doesn't sit well with me. Also when people bandy about terms like "lock-in" and apply it to Canonical for situations that are nothing like true vendor lock-in, I smell a rat. Really if people don't want to use Ubuntu, there are plenty of other distributions. Say what you like and don't worry about what you don't like.

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Originally Posted by VTPoet

Cool. And then what's the difference between an official and unofficial derivative?

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AFAICT it has to do with official support from Canonical and the Ubuntu community. I don't have a bullet-point list of what it involves, there's probably something in a FAQ somewhere.

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Originally Posted by lykwydchykyn

AFAICT it has to do with official support from Canonical and the Ubuntu community. I don't have a bullet-point list of what it involves, there's probably something in a FAQ somewhere.

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I tried to google the guidelines but couldn't find what I was looking for. It doesn't matter. I was just curious as to whether MIR would fall under the rubric of official or unofficial.

One characteristic of Ubuntu derivatives is that they use only official Ubuntu repositories. Wayland and Xorg are already there and if Ubuntu continues being Debian based they will stay. So I don't foresee a problem in this sense.

But what really makes a derivative official is the blessing from Canonical, that comes when they consider that it contributes significantly to Ubuntu, whatever that means. Since this is quite subjective they could start forcing Mir, but they didn't do that with Ubuntu One or the Software Center, and these are revenue sources for Canonical, so why would they start now with Mir?

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Originally Posted by VTPoet

I tried to google the guidelines but couldn't find what I was looking for. It doesn't matter. I was just curious as to whether MIR would fall under the rubric of official or unofficial.

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I'm sure Mir will be officially supported software, since it's (a) developed by Canonical and (b) critical to the main product.

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Since this is quite subjective they could start forcing Mir, but they didn't do that with Ubuntu One or the Software Center, and these are revenue sources for Canonical, so why would they start now with Mir?

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I don't think they could ever force Mir (especially to the exclusion of X), since that would mean either dumping every other desktop environment, or coding support for Mir into all the other desktop environments. But I don't think Canonical is going to be devoting resources to packaging Wayland in Ubuntu, it's going to be up to the wider community. I could be wrong, it probably depends on how important Wayland becomes in the big picture.

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Originally Posted by lykwydchykyn

I don't think they could ever force Mir (especially to the exclusion of X), since that would mean either dumping every other desktop environment, or coding support for Mir into all the other desktop environments. .

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Mir is a replacement for X, and Canonical is apparently planning to patch the most used widget toolkits so DE can work with Mir. Their roadmap also includes an X emulation/compatibility layer for "legacy" apps.

This goes quite deep, and apparently Canonical is betting on betting on Ubuntu getting enough desktop, tablet and phone market share to make Mir the new defacto standard.
Not that this is necessarily bad. There's quite some agreement that X is getting old, so looking for innovation is a good idea. Remains to be seen what will be come the "next X".

(there's a roadmap/spec for Mir at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec?act...direct=MirSpec )

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Originally Posted by VTPoet

So, a question for those more knowledgeable. If Ubuntu develops MIR for its display server and the rest of the Linux ecosystem goes with Wayland (as apparently Mint, KDE and Gnome intend to do) isn't that a fairly serious split? Am I right in thinking that this could seriously marginalize every distribution that uses Wayland? -- or is the choice of display server fairly seamless (meaning, for instance, that game developers wouldn't have to develop two separate versions of a game). With this make twice as much work for developers considering Linux? -- or not?

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In your example, it would marginalize Ubuntu, not Wayland. The result would be Ubuntu being used with X and other distributions using Wayland competing for mindshare. After all, what would be the point of Mir, if you couldn't use any applications with it?

Game developers tend to develop using various toolkits and libraries, so it would depend on whether those get ported to Wayland, Mir, or stick with X. On the other hand, applications that don't use any toolkits do exist - Blender comes to mind - and these would need to choose to support Wayland or Mir if X actually gets phased out.

That said, X will be around for a very long time.

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Originally Posted by koenn

Mir is a replacement for X, and Canonical is apparently planning to patch the most used widget toolkits so DE can work with Mir. )

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You have to patch more than toolkits for a whole DE to work; there's also the window manager, display manager, configuration tools for the monitor & graphics hardware, etc.

If they're patching toolkits, it's so that applications can work on Mir; I don't see them doing the work to bring Gnome or KDE to Mir, especially since the whole point is to have Unity running across all devices.

I think the effect on the "Ecosystem" will be positive.

Canonical have decided that X does not meet it's future needs/requirements, they probably had a look at Wayland and decided the same thing, in the end they decided to build their own tool. Now they are getting attacked for building an Open Source tool? They are giving Open Source developers a new tool to work with, I don't understand the hate.

I give a slight chuckle when I hear the argument that they are fragmenting the Open Source community. They are doing what all Open Source developers should be doing, building tools that they want to use because the current tools are not good enough.

Mir being a huge success will have only good consequences for the Wayland team, they will be able to look at what Canonical have done and take out the good and emulate it. If Mir is a big failure the Wayland team can instead see where the pitfalls are and try their best to avoid them.

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Originally Posted by solarghost

Canonical have decided that X does not meet it's future needs/requirements, they probably had a look at Wayland and decided the same thing, in the end they decided to build their own tool. Now they are getting attacked for building an Open Source tool? They are giving Open Source developers a new tool to work with, I don't understand the hate.

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No, they didn't have an honest look at Wayland, but that has been discussed in other threads on this forum.

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I give a slight chuckle when I hear the argument that they are fragmenting the Open Source community. They are doing what all Open Source developers should be doing, building tools that they want to use because the current tools are not good enough.

Mir being a huge success will have only good consequences for the Wayland team, they will be able to look at what Canonical have done and take out the good and emulate it. If Mir is a big failure the Wayland team can instead see where the pitfalls are and try their best to avoid them.

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I don't think you understand what people mean by fragmentation being a problem. This isn't about Linux users wanting a One True Way. This is about toolkit developers needing to bear the burden of an additional display server. It's also about driver developers needing to support another display server. Developers who are already stretched too thin.