"Intel Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir" What will be the consequences?

[Bucky Ball]

@ikt: The MC or presenter you, ikt? I notice the Australian accents.

[whatthefunk]

Canonical wants to go out on their own. These are the consequences.

[mastablasta]

well to me it's strange they go against everything and against warnings form others. i understand you need ot stand for yourself, but sometimes some self reflection is necessary.
the Ubuntu Edge campain was ran in a ridiculous way (the incentives, the choice of campaign place...) only to have it failed miserably despite so many pledges by companies and individuals...
they went on their own with GTK based Unity interface (which still doesn't work with all apps) totally abandoning KDE (Qt) based Kubuntu (apparently because businesses were more interested in Gnome) only to later finding out that they should use Qt for mobile version... And this despite the fact that when they were still planning mobile OS the KDE already had a working Qt based plasma touch interface. and the fact that they in the end dropped Gnome interface anyway.

inventing the wheel is what they do lately it seems... but then again it is their choice and they have to deal with consequences. it seems to me they really do have plenty of resources. or at least so they think.

[mikewhatever]

well to me it's strange they go against everything and against warnings form others. i understand you need ot stand for yourself, but sometimes some self reflection is necessary.
the Ubuntu Edge campain was ran in a ridiculous way (the incentives, the choice of campaign place...) only to have it failed miserably despite so many pledges by companies and individuals...
they went on their own with GTK based Unity interface (which still doesn't work with all apps) totally abandoning KDE (Qt) based Kubuntu (apparently because businesses were more interested in Gnome) only to later finding out that they should use Qt for mobile version... And this despite the fact that when they were still planning mobile OS the KDE already had a working Qt based plasma touch interface. and the fact that they in the end dropped Gnome interface anyway.

inventing the wheel is what they do lately it seems... but then again it is their choice and they have to deal with consequences. it seems to me they really do have plenty of resources. or at least so they think.

Where does all the "if you aren't with us, you are against us" attidude come from?
Ubuntu decided to go its own way, so what? Why is that a bad thing?
Why are people (many of whom, apparently don't use Ubuntu) so peeved up about Canonical tying to invent something?

[ZoiaGuyver]

I still don't understand why Wayland just has to be accepted by a "one fits all" solution. Mir just gives Canonical a better way to make use of Unity 8.

The whole argument though is invalid to begin with.. "The management" is not a technical refusal for any commit, the project is open source it only means that as has been done every other time, Downstream will be responsible for the patches, more work for Ubuntu and the maintainers but meh.

We are 5 years on and still waiting to see the Wayland protocol to be used as a default in any distribution. You can say "Oh well the community agreed" the community didn't agree to anything in Wayland.. It was the ONLY choice. Also look at past experience with the "community" we have been happily chugging away with a 26 year old X server because there was nothing else.

From my point of view all this backing of Wayland is great, but to say the GNU/Linux community supports it is kinda meh, Wayland is not GPL'd, Other projects wont accept XMir/Mir as it is GPLv3 and it isn't "upstream", yet the patches to make it available upstream are then reverted by the management. How does this management talk for everyone in the community? I've been a Linux user for the last 20+ years of my life and to see such underhanded tactics as "the management" used in a so called "open source" project is sickening. The whole argument around this is not that the commit was refused, it is the reason it was reverted, "The Management". No technical reason, not even a "well its a single distro solution so we don't feel the patch is needed upstream" (although that goes back to the original point of Mir not being accepted upstream, so other projects wont use it).

We can all criticise Canonical for the way they have done things (hell most of us do it daily including me!, when something doesn't work just the way I want), but they are only human.. Intel is just a company after their own goals, I guess even after all the years battling for Wintel to disappear people are just happy to see someone else as the bad guy, in this case Canonical/Ubuntu. People can say about Canonical not giving back upstream, yet this isn't the first time that Canonical has pushed for acceptance upstream only to be told "No".

Wayland is not working in any distro as a default, it does not even have a fully commited distro as of yet (Rebeccablack is a tech preview), it can talk all it wants about how it is the accepted solution but as for the distros using it as a default protocol (to use a Linus Torvalds comment) "Talk is cheap, Show us the code". Wayland does not have full support from the "Desktop linux" market (one of the influential distros is kinda missing), Yet already has commits to support it upstream, one of the main devs for Wayland works at Intel, a few of the others at Collabora.

Most say they use linux because it's "open source" I guess that fits for aslong as you want, then you can change on a penny. I'm not a "Free software" advocate, I'm an "Open Source" advocate.

I'll stop the rant though, Its probably a wasted excercise as most seem to want Wayland and no competition.. I guess having competition is bad, I mean Linux isn't the only kernel, it is the best (in a lot of peoples opinion, including mine). But there are a lot of others like Mach, but I guess having a choice on the only part of the system that the "Community" has decided on is fine, X is the only thing that between most systems is the only solution.

[etna2]

Where does all the "if you aren't with us, you are against us" attidude come from?
Ubuntu decided to go its own way, so what? Why is that a bad thing?
Why are people (many of whom, apparently don't use Ubuntu) so peeved up about Canonical tying to invent something?

Canonical are free to do what they want, and they better be prepared for the consequences of their actions.

Any distro is free to fork and invent what they think is needed for themselves as long as they leave the core base system stack alone. Especially when X --> Wayland was already determined 3 years ago as the de facto migration path when Canonical themselves first proposed it. This X-to-Wayland migration was also backed by all the major distributions.

This is tantamount to backstabbing, especially when Canonical never bothered to contribute anything to the Wayland project over those 3 years, and suddenly released their own 'open' project that was developed in secret, and essentially split the graphics stack into 2; Mir vs Wayland with all the crap such as incompatible drivers that they single-handedly created.

And they got the gall to request that upstream accept their single-distro-only Mir compatibility patches, and subsequently complain that upstream is making their life harder by refusing to accept them?

And for the record, this is not the first time Canonical has been hostile to the larger Linux software stack. At a much higher level, ever wonder why not a single distribution is actively packaging Unity as a DE even though Canonical claims that they are free to do so? Here's the answer; it requires so many Ubuntu-specific bits and patches that it places an unnecessary maintenance burden for any non Ubuntu-based distribution.

Canonical has never planned to share their projects with the larger Linux user base, period. Just throwing code out there as open source does not mean a thing at all. You can see from how every single patch request made to the various toolkits, Mesa and the individual X drivers have been either rejected outright or just plain ignored.

Since Canonical loves to do things their own way there's nothing stopping them from tracking every single X driver, Xserver and Mesa release and performing downstream patches themselves. Since is it claimed in the various mailing lists that the patchset is reasonably small (<1500 lines), it should be a walk in the park to perform those downstream patches.

Wayland does not have full support from the "Desktop linux" market (one of the influential distros is kinda missing), Yet already has commits to support it upstream, one of the main devs for Wayland works at Intel, a few of the others at Collabora.

GTK3 and Qt5 are almost fully Wayland capable. Gnome is also close to full Wayland support, while KDE is expected to see core Wayland support with Frameworks 5. I consider that very significant support considerig almost every single desktop Linux configuration is built over GTK or Qt. And neither of them even want to consider Mir support as an upstream goal. at all.

[ZoiaGuyver]

Who decided it was the "de facto migration"? it definatly wasn't the community as the community already has a choice in every other part of the system bar X, so it being the communitys decision would mean around 30 display servers/Protocols.

Look at it this way..

Kernel: Linux, Mach, BSD (plus many others)

DE/UX: Unity, Gnome, KDE, LXDE (many others)

Toolchain: GNU, Cygwin, MiniWG, PS3 (others)

Display Server: X.org

I kinda see a problem there as far as wanting a monopoly on one part of the system goes.. Also Drivers are written for the Architecture be it x86, ARM, PPC, there is even a choice there on what to use. Yet display server, no we can't have competition there, it has to be X > Wayland and nothing else..

[prodigy_]

Since Canonical loves to do things their own way there's nothing stopping them from tracking every single X driver, Xserver and Mesa release and performing downstream patches themselves.

And eventually making their own kernel.

Seriously, the sooner - the better.

[etna2]

Who decided it was the "de facto migration"? i

Canonical (at that time)
Red Hat
Fedora
OpenSUSE
Arch
GTK
Qt
Intel
KDE
Gnome
X.org (at least, the Linux developers)

and recently, Mate.

[ZoiaGuyver]

The kernel has nothing to do with this at all. Linux is a "universal" kernel. Plus in a sense people do "make" their own kernels through guess what "patches" CK patch sets and many others.

But i agree I wish Canonical would say "Fu" to the community as a whole and just close off all the stuff they do, like Google does. Then we wouldn't have the problem of a so called "Community" thinking they have any decision on the course of a project.