Mir: Stop this train before it derails Ubuntu.

[ZoiaGuyver]

I'm not normally one to get into these kinds of "debates" but with all the FUD about this "Wayland vs Mir" stuff I can't help but put my penny in.

X.org has been around for 26 years it was never intended to do what it does today and if you look at the way it works and what it works on, it is no more than a mass of hacks and band aids to keep it going. Wayland is a great direction to go for X.org and I'm certain will be a big success no matter what. Mir is the right way to go to achieve what "Ubuntu" want's to achieve, they are looking for a "unified" experience across many device formats. Wayland isn't going to cut it for what they need, so they are building something that can do it.

All this argument and people saying about projects being "stabbed in the back" is imo over the top and uncalled for. A lot of the people saying this stuff already hate or have hated Canonical anyways in the past. Unity was meant to be a "failboat" and Canonical should have stuck with Gnome, This has panned out to be the total opposite and Unity although not the success I would have liked it to have been, is still a major success the same will happen with Mir. In the early days it will prob have bugs and "usability" problems, you will probably see all the "naysayers" and "told you so" people out in strength, bashing Canonical and Ubuntu into the floor about how users will mass migrate (and they prob will at the start). Then a few releases down the line it will drop into the same as we see with Unity, people having to backtrack on things that had been said (even myself, I hated Unity at the start, Now I use it's pretty much daily).

I just want to bring up that no one in Canonical or from what I have seen posted want's Wayland to fail, what they do want though it for it to become the "De-facto" standard for Linux. Why is it so many hate the announcement of Mir (ok the way it was announced could have been better timed and worded) some I have seen want Mir to fail just so they can blame Canonical? Fragmentation is a word used a lot in the posts I have read and tbh Mir will cause no more fragmentation than Nvidia vs ATI/AMD has down the years.

People will take what works. If Mir does what Ubuntu wants it to (which im 110% sure it will, maybe not straight away but it will get there) then it's an achievement and advance for everyone. Ubuntu brought Steam to Linux (atleast as far as a supported Linux version goes). When Ubuntu switches to Mir with the current time investment and backing from Valve I cannot see Mir failing at all.

This is being done "for us" its not "against us". We may not all agree on how or why but if we did then I would think the community had a lot more problems than we do now (mutual agreement on anything community wide is unheard of, there is always something someone dislikes).

Lets all just agree that we can't see the future and we don't know how things will pan out.

[mikodo]

Deleted.

[mr john]

I couldnt care less. If it works great. If not then there are plenty of other options available. Don't see why people are making such a big deal out of it.

[Synthead]

GPL software is GPL software. Have you read the GPL license? If Canonical wants to copy their code, make a minor change, and call it something they made up, they can. Look at the forks of MySQL. All the custom Linux kernels. The list goes on. As long as they comply with the licenses at-hand, nobody needs to worry about "borrowing," "ripping off," or otherwise acting outside of the GPL's purpose. In fact, this kind of behavior is encouraged, and the developers who picked the GPL as their license agreed to its terms.

[3rdalbum]

Forking anything is great - look at Libreoffice, MATE, Cinnamon, Nvidia/Kompozer/Bluegriffon and how well they are received. Writing a new text editor or video editor or desktop environment or display server is also great. Developers should be able to scratch their itch! Even with all this forking, the Linux desktop is not fragmented...

...until it is Canonical doing it, then suddenly it will destroy Linux and kill all the kittens of the world and cause the Earth to fall into the sun.

[tartalo]

Forking anything is great - look at Libreoffice, MATE, Cinnamon, Nvidia/Kompozer/Bluegriffon and how well they are received. Writing a new text editor or video editor or desktop environment or display server is also great. Developers should be able to scratch their itch! Even with all this forking, the Linux desktop is not fragmented...

...until it is Canonical doing it, then suddenly it will destroy Linux and kill all the kittens of the world and cause the Earth to fall into the sun.

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.

[hansdown]

Tartalo, thanks for your insight.

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.

These are perhaps the wisest words in this thread.

I was stoked to hear of the ubuntu phone, and happy, that canonical could become "income generating".

I appreciate Mark Shuttleworth's funding, and personal hard work, but the developement priorities over the last few years, leaves me hankering for former times.

Personally, I no longer plan to buy an ubuntu phone.

I have been keenly following tizen developement, as they are upfront, and honest with their plans.

[castrojo]

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.

a) Distros and desktops are already incompatible.
b) The last place anyone would look to generate income would be a display server.

[JDShu]

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

Let me preface by saying I agree completely, but I wanted to discuss some of the points you are bringing up.

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.

Regarding drivers, my understanding from reading discussions elsewhere (namely r/linux and phoronix) is that as long as a gpu drivers supports EGL, then it will support Wayland/Mir/Whatever else. So this might not be a problem.

In terms of toolkits and DEs, the question is whether they will support both Wayland and Mir. Obviously all the toolkits and DEs are supporting Wayland so there is no issues on that front. Additionally, Canonical will certainly support anything that Ubuntu needs downstream. The end result is that there will probably be no issues for most users. The only potential problem I could see is Canonical dropping the ball supporting various toolkits and applications which could harm Ubuntu users, but doesn't affect the ecosystem as a whole.

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 think this is attributing too much malice to Canonical. More likely, Canonical wants control over their display server so that they can rapidly adjust to changing conditions instead of having to wait for Wayland community.

[BigSilly]

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 honestly don't see a future where either Wayland or Mir "wins" anything. I think both will co-exist happily and the driver vendors will support both, and I think the community is fretting itself unnecessarily over a potential "winner". Just imho, how it looks to me on the outside of the development community, as a user.