Mir: Stop this train before it derails Ubuntu.

[quequotion]

Of course, the DE on Canonical's product will be limited to what Canonical provides. That's how it's always worked. They provide Unity on Ubuntu. Other DE's are available for other initiatives. It doesn't look like that's going to change.

There will be one important difference: Until Ubuntu/Mir, users and developers can take Ubuntu's software suite and configuration and adapt it to their needs. If enough people have preferences in common, they could even repackage the OS with their own choices and re-distribute it under a new name. Developing for Mir requires agreeing to a license form Canonical that makes your code "Mir derivative", even if you are merely adapting something that existed before Mir, and therefore tied to Canonical legally (this is one of the reasons KDE and therefore Kubuntu will not implement Mir). In addition, other DEs using X11 or Wayland will become so different from Ubuntu that there won't be much point in maintaining themselves as Ubuntu derivatives. It may even be more practical to re-base back to Debian for distributions that want similarity with Ubuntu but don't intend to use Unity.

I'm concerned about what that means for the future of Ubuntu, as it means lots of users leaving the distribution. Without a userbase, it won't matter what Canonical does with their display server.

If someone wants to use an app on Unity that can't run on Mir then, yes, that user has a problem. It is, though, a problem with many, many parallels in the current environment. Not all apps, and certainly not all versions of apps, run on all systems.

The Ubuntu universe is already split and diversified in uncounted ways. It will stay that way, like the rest of Linux. Some people will build derivatives on Mir, some on Wayland, some on X.

I'd like to agree with you, that "diversification" does not necessarily mean "fracturing" and that developing one alternative does not negatively affect another. In most cases that's true, and it's one of the virtues of the greater linux community: whatever it is you want, it's probably out there.

Unfortunately, it's not quite the situation we have here. Canonical didn't simply develop an alternative to X11 or Wayland. Canonical promised to develop Wayland, contributed relatively little work over a long period of time, then dropped it in favor of their own solution while citing several bogus technical reasons for doing so (later redacted). This happened not long before the "Community" link vanished from the main site (back now, as part of the new navigation bar; explained, but not apologized for, in a blog post that reeked of "oops, we got caught"). Canonical has not been playing well with others lately. Mir isn't diversification, it's domination.

Canonical, the business, wants to develop Ubuntu as a single platform that can run on all devices. That becomes much more difficult, and problematic, if Canonical lacks control of the core components that need to run on all those devices. That, presumably, is the reason they're doing Mir, not Wayland. Some Wayland developers don't agree with that, but it really isn't their call.

I don't see why they have to own the components to make use of them. I also don't see things like Ubuntu TV actually happening, but that's another topic. If Canonical had increased their contribution to Wayland, they could have had more influence on it and it might have been ready for distribution release earlier. Rather than contribute so something that could help everyone, they've decided to focus on what's best for them and them alone.

I don't know how all this will impact the Ubuntu "community". Frankly, I don't know what that really is.

Not easy to define indeed. We have a lot of communities coming together to make what I think of as the Ubuntu community. To me this includes all the people who develop software that gets included in Ubuntu (which likely includes people who have never even used Ubuntu) as well as the users of Ubuntu and all of its derivatives (some of which are quite different from the source). That's a lot of people, a lot of a lot of people.

In the future, if Canonical sticks with Mir, many of those people will be cut off from the Ubuntu community, which will consist of only those people who develop for QMir (only the qt toolkit has yet been ported to Mir) and those who use the standard Ubuntu distribution.

[MadmanRB]

For me my biggest concern for Mir is who it will effect those who use proprietary cards for gaming, especially steam.
So when Mir is forced on us in 14.04 will it break gaming compatibility and such.
If Canonical is willing to ditch x in 14.04 trhey must hav e some plan in store.
Either thast or people will be using Xubuntu for gaming.

[quequotion]

Probably the support will be made through EGL and Wayland can use that and both can use the same FOSS drivers. There is not much of duplication work needed when it comes to drivers. Basically AFAIK supporting one will support both.

That's good to hear, let's hope you are right!

Basically you can look it like this if Canonical would stick to pure Wayland (protocol) they still might not use Weston (reference compositor) and situation would be similar to what we have now.

Weston isn't intended to be used as the main compositor. I wouldn't have any problem with Ubuntu/Wayland+Theoretical Unity Compositor (compiz?). This would make it much easier for developers to port Ubuntu derivatives to new versions of Ubuntu, as they'd only need to develop a compositor, and easier for users to try out derivatives that wouldn't be so radically different from Ubuntu. In addition, users and developers alike could enjoy all the advantages of Wayland over X11 (assuming development would reach release stage by that time).

I think it makes sense to support both now and to be positive about it and hope both will be ready for consumers ASAP.

I'd like to be positive about it, but I'm not a "consumer". I'm a user. I don't like having software branded, boxed and sold to me, even for free. I also don't like restrictive licensing agreements, like the one required to develop with Mir. It doesn't make sense to me to support a project that's going to restrict its users, especially when there's an alternative that will have as many benefits and doesn't limit its own usefulness.

Although I understand Canonical's need to monetize, I don't want to see Ubuntu, which once stood for responding to the community's needs, become a commercial product focused on only profit. I see Mir as part of a process of closing the walls in around Ubuntu so that it can be boxed up and put on shelves. That's not the OS I'm interested in. I hope I'm not alone.

Of course I could simply go elsewhere, but I like Ubuntu; I like its debian package management; I like its licensed binary drivers that make things work (even if they aren't absolutely "free"); I like its flexibility (I run a custom DE made of compiz and pantheon); I've been using it at home exclusively since Jaunty (did you know this bug has not been fixed in all that time?). I won't be able to use Mir either, since I'm not interested in using Unity and I don't see other DE developers becoming motivated to develop for Mir in light of Canonical's attitude and behaviour. If it were just me it wouldn't make any difference, but I think the direction Canonical is going with Mir, Unity, and Ubuntu in general is a self-destructive one that will lead to more users and developers leaving the distribution.

[quequotion]

For me my biggest concern for Mir is who it will effect those who use proprietary cards for gaming, especially steam.
So when Mir is forced on us in 14.04 will it break gaming compatibility and such.
If Canonical is willing to ditch x in 14.04 trhey must hav e some plan in store.
Either thast or people will be using Xubuntu for gaming.

They hope to secure commitments from NVidia and ATI to support Mir by 14.04, but April 2014 is less than a year away and neither NVidia nor ATI has are going to rewrite their drivers to support an incomplete display server that is only used by one distribution. If the procedure is more trivial than a rewrite, or if Mir somehow becomes desirable to other distributions, there's a possibility that development could get underway in 2014... One also has to consider the history of Canonical's major design change decisions, which have almost consistently been minefields.

Lubuntu would be better for gaming I sometimes use a custom openbox DE for gaming myself.

[castrojo]

Although I understand Canonical's need to monetize, I don't want to see Ubuntu, which once stood for responding to the community's needs, become a commercial product focused on only profit. I see Mir as part of a process of closing the walls in around Ubuntu so that it can be boxed up and put on shelves. That's not the OS I'm interested in. I hope I'm not alone.

It's impossible to close off Ubuntu, Mir is GPL3 and everything in main is required to be OSS, it's part of the Ubuntu promise.

I won't be able to use Mir either, since I'm not interested in using Unity and I don't see other DE developers becoming motivated to develop for Mir in light of Canonical's attitude and behaviour. If it were just me it wouldn't make any difference, but I think the direction Canonical is going with Mir, Unity, and Ubuntu in general is a self-destructive one that will lead to more users and developers leaving the distribution.

I think you're over-reacting, you'll be able to use whatever window manager you want via XMir; as far as the end user is concerned they probably won't even notice Mir is there.

[EgoGratis]

Weston isn't intended to be used as the main compositor. I wouldn't have any problem with Ubuntu/Wayland+Theoretical Unity Compositor.

Yes but you see Canonical would have to make/code this just like it is doing with Mir.

I also don't like restrictive licensing agreements, like the one required to develop with Mir.

CLAs are not restrictive for the end user to be honest. You are probably talking about that? CLA does give more power to Canonical to change the licence in the future to something else or to distribute the code with more licences BUT:

-Everything that was already done cant be "undone" in a way it would effect the licence of current Mir (GPL).
-Currently the main source of developers are AFAIK Canonical employees and they code everything under GPL terms...
-Qt toolkit for example uses CLA too...

In the end if it's used only on Ubuntu for Unity it doesn't change much it's just more work for Canonical and that is about it. If it makes Ubuntu more popular it will probably help to boost Wayland too and if it stays GPL software i don't see a reason why others couldn't adopt it in some way. Being Wayland or Mir based is not that important in my opinion ATM because both relies on the same drivers and share much more than one would think.

[deadflowr]

For me my biggest concern for Mir is who it will effect those who use proprietary cards for gaming, especially steam.
So when Mir is forced on us in 14.04 will it break gaming compatibility and such.
If Canonical is willing to ditch x in 14.04 trhey must hav e some plan in store.
Either thast or people will be using Xubuntu for gaming.

Until the proprietary driver makers make their choices on what to build drivers for, anyone using their drivers will run X, and mir will be nothing but dead files on their system.

[cariboo]

@quequotion, I don't know if you've been following the conversation here, because most of what you have been posting, is just plain FUD. Check out the video link at the bottom of the email.

[EgoGratis]

Until the proprietary driver makers make their choices on what to build drivers for, anyone using their drivers will run X, and mir will be nothing but dead files on their system.

I am quite sure they will support both over EGL and that this will be done soon.

[EgoGratis]

@quequotion, I don't know if you've been following the conversation here, because most of what you have been posting, is just plain FUD. Check out the video link at the bottom of the email.

I wouldn't call it FUD it's just majority of users don't have needed information yet...