Mir: Stop this train before it derails Ubuntu.

[ikt]

I'm no expert on this thing, but it seems to me that the idea driving both Mir and Wayland is that one way or another they offer a better solution than X. Either way these new display servers should be a better solution for Nvidia and AMD/ATI graphics driver devs to support over X.

I feel the same way about deb and rpm, both are better than source compiling in my opinion... yet for some reason there's no outage about half of linux distro's using RPM and the other half using DEB, this is by far the biggest incompatibility of them all, could you imagine if instead of all those innocent windows users downloading the source in .tar.gz's to extract and stare at in disbelief that in 2013 you can't just click and install a program, they all had .debrpm packages, which upon double clicking installed the program with whichever distro he or she used? But nobody says anything, rpm and deb are just accepted.

[EgoGratis]

The thing isn't that Canonical is bad whatever they do, but that whoever doing what Canonical is doing now would be doing bad.

Replacing the display server implicates a lot of projects that need to follow, it has nothing to do with "I'll make another wysiwyg web authoring tool (kompozer) and let users decide whether they use it or not", the display server involves GPU drivers, toolkits, desktop environments... In a few words, everyone. If you take in account that everyone had already been discussing for years about Wayland as a replacement to X, and investing time on it, whoever came out the blue with something like Mir would be the bad guy, whoever.

In this case it was Canonical, they thought that, since they were such a popular distro, introducing an artificial incompatibility with other distros and DEs would benefit their income despite the problems caused to their own users.

I'll repeat that just in case someone thinks that all this noise is because of the envy from other distro users: It's not, Mir will cause problems mostly to Ubuntu users, the ones that are most angry are the Ubuntu users or ex-users that understand the consequences of Canonical's plans.

My opinion is that either they miscalculated their own power, or they counted with losing a great amount of desktop users. After all, Ubuntu's business is in the phone now.

Yes it could go both ways it could "hurt" Ubuntu to some extend or it could make Ubuntu accepted and viable upstream in certain areas and i guess we will not have to wait too long to see the direction it will go.

[Roasted]

My 2c:

- Canonical is free to do what they wish, just as any other tech company/community is. I applaud them for trying something a bit different.
- Canonical acted incredibly foolish and arrogant in regard to releasing this news. Their behavior with nearly everything is somewhat disturbing. I hope they took notes to not repeat... any... of that in the future.
- If I were running Canonical, I'm not sure that choosing Mir would be a bad choice. The need for a unified experience could be more efficient with in-house development that cuts out a magnitude of middle-men. On the flip side, I wonder why they didn't fork Wayland to some degree and just use that. That being said, it sounds pretty definitive (based on what I read) that Mir's current status is thanks to years of Wayland development, which makes Mir seem like it was developed significantly faster than what it truly was. Some sources have already called it a fork. LOL?
- I used to love Unity, but the more nonsense lenses they cram into it, the more I lose interest in Unity all together. If me dropping Unity drops Mir, so be it.
- My lack of interest in Unity does not cause me any grief or hatred towards Canonical whatsoever. I still want them to be successful. Meanwhile, I simply use what works best for me. Ubuntu GNOME fits that bill 1000x over again for a long list of reasons.
- As long as there are no obnoxious support or compatibility issues, I won't disown Canonical. The day Mir gets Nvidia/Intel/AMD drivers while the rest of the world gets nothing, you can bet I'll rage something fierce. Candid opinion: If anybody 'deserves' anything in terms of driver support, I'd vote the Wayland crowd hands down.

All of this is quite bitter sweet. I want them to succeed, but only if it doesn't directly demolish chances of further support coming from the notable companies I listed above to Wayland. Maybe I'm just a hippy where I want everybody to win and be successful, but like I said, not at the expense of the entirety of the Linux community outside of Ubuntu.

But again, just my 2c.

[ZoiaGuyver]

All of this is quite bitter sweet. I want them to succeed, but only if it doesn't directly demolish chances of further support coming from the notable companies I listed above to Wayland. Maybe I'm just a hippy where I want everybody to win and be successful, but like I said, not at the expense of the entirety of the Linux community outside of Ubuntu.

But again, just my 2c.

Na your not a "hippy" (or maybe you are.. and I'm in the "hippy" camp aswell).

I think Mir is a solution for "Ubuntu", they said in one post (i'll try and find the interview about it) that Wayland was trying to do "too much" and a lot of what it can achieve isn't needed for what Ubuntu want's (maybe wayland/westons feature set is getting a little like X?). I think all the worry over the driver support at the moment is pretty much a non-issue, Linux has always had a way of "Working with what you have" I can't see either project forgetting something as major as driver support (afaik at the moment both Wayland and Mir are planned to be well supported by the OSS drivers). If they get "official" support within the proprietary drivers I would def prefer to see Wayland get it first, Canonical/Ubuntu has done a lot for Linux in the sense of exposure, but if that exposure is to the detriment of other projects then it becomes a massive issue (I do not think in any way that is either the plan or goal of the projects, I think it just a "worst case scenario" people are thinking about).

Linux is about "choice" and "freedom" these two projects have the ability to offer both.