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

[neu5eeCh]

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?

[mr john]

Shouldn't make much difference if there is a compatibility layer. The developers who are going to have to do more work will probably be the Mir developers. I don't really take the opinions of Mint or Gnome seriously. It's been known for a quite some time that some people in those groups don't like Ubuntu. Gnome Shell sucks and it's highly likely that UI will drive them into obscurity over the next few years. Linux Mint just like to say things to try and show that they aren't Ubuntu. They have a bit of an identity issue.

[grahammechanical]

"Splits" as you call it are part of the genetic make up of Free and Open Source Software. Richard Stallman had a serious difference of opinion about how softeware should be developed and distributed and now we have FOSS. From the beginning there have been divisions. If someone does not like the way things are being done or they have a disagreement with another developer then they split and "fork the code" as the saying goes. Why is Wayland being developed when we have Xserver? Why is KDE being developed when we have Gnome? Why have Linux Mint (based upon Debian and Ubuntu) when we have Ubuntu?

Apparently, anybody can do what they like but let Ubuntu go a different way and it is cursed into the outer darkness. The only way to avoid this apparent "twice as much work" is for developers to be employed by one massive corporation. In FOSS developers are free to work on whatever projects that interest them. If this were not true then we would not have a Linux kernel not even a Gnu/Linux kernel. We would still be waiting for a GNU kernel.

This is life in the Free and Open Source ecosystem.

[neu5eeCh]

Thanks Grahammechenical, can't say as I disagree with anything you've written. My question was more practical than political. I'm wondering how, if at all, two different display servers will affect development.

Ubuntu is the 800 pound gorilla. Take Steam for instance. Steam has already chosen sides. From what I can tell, they picked Ubuntu. Steam will now run on Fedora (and Arch I think), but it's not as if Steam devs developed Steam for Fedora. When Ubuntu switches to MIR, will this increasingly exacerbate the marginalization of non-Ubuntu distros (there's Ubuntu and then there's the rest of them)? Or is the difference between MIR and Wayland negligible?

[3rdalbum]

The effect:

1. Wayland development will speed up to a furious pace to compete with Mir, which will benefit all distros that may ship Wayland in the future.

2. Mir has on-paper support from GPU makers such as AMD and Nvidia. Wayland has none. Wayland will become the geeky choice for the Ubuntu-haters, and Mir will become the choice for regular users who would prefer good 3D performance over "freedom".

3. You'll see other distros either adopt Mir as an option, or sink further into irrelevance. Either way, Mir will be THE display server for hip young Linux users

*all this is assuming that Mir doesn't become abandonware, or that it doesn't end off being a total schmozzle.

[montag dp]

Lots of assumptions going on in this thread. No one really knows yet. Hopefully one will win out and become adopted by the whole community. I'm sick of this "us vs them" mentality that seems to be increasing lately (judging completely by forum posts).

[lykwydchykyn]

Lots of assumptions going on in this thread. No one really knows yet. Hopefully one will win out and become adopted by the whole community. I'm sick of this "us vs them" mentality that seems to be increasing lately (judging completely by forum posts).

I agree; why is every project who supports wayland suddenly an "Ubuntu hater" motivated purely by anti-Canonical sentiment just because they don't drop 3+ years of development work the day Canonical announces a new display server that they've been developing in secret for six months?

.

[llanitedave]

The effect:

1. Wayland development will speed up to a furious pace to compete with Mir, which will benefit all distros that may ship Wayland in the future.

2. Mir has on-paper support from GPU makers such as AMD and Nvidia. Wayland has none. Wayland will become the geeky choice for the Ubuntu-haters, and Mir will become the choice for regular users who would prefer good 3D performance over "freedom".

3. You'll see other distros either adopt Mir as an option, or sink further into irrelevance. Either way, Mir will be THE display server for hip young Linux users

*all this is assuming that Mir doesn't become abandonware, or that it doesn't end off being a total schmozzle.

2. If Mir is open source, wouldn't its supporting code for AMD and Nvidia be free for the Wayland developers to use or adapt? Seems like there might be a door for compatibility between the two.

[Gyokuro]

Wayland/Weston is already a working system whereas MIR is far away from a working system. In my opinion some people have the impression that Canonical is leading the further development of Linux (in this case desktop) but it is not (it is louder as the rest) and if you compare the posted specification of MIR/UnityNext you will see it is somehow only a clone of Google's Chrome OS and much more developers are working for wayland and bring in support for wayland in various toolkits. If you can not attract developers outside of Ubuntu's universe how long can Canonical maintain all patches for various toolkits outside of their upstream projects? Either you work with the community or against and fail.

[neu5eeCh]

I agree; why is every project who supports wayland suddenly an "Ubuntu hater" motivated purely by anti-Canonical sentiment just because they don't drop 3+ years of development work the day Canonical announces a new display server that they've been developing in secret for six months?

Okay, I honestly don't know what's motivating your comment or montag dp's. Just to be clear, I didn't say anything about "Ubuntu hating" or even suggest the same. If I'm being too sensitive (and you're not suggesting that I did) then we're all happy.

Moving on...

I still don't get a sense for whether, practically speaking, MIR and Wayland will lead to two different development environments (which really would divide the Linux ecosystem from a software developer's perspective). If Ubuntu is the Llinux distro of choice, then am I mistaken in thinking that any future third party software makers (such as another Steam) would exclude other distros simply by virtue of being "coded for MIR"?