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

[carterclan2]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTQ1NjY

What will this mean for the Mir project?

[grahammechanical]

This is what it will mean

Canonical will now need to carry the XMir support out-of-tree from the xf86-video-intel driver. Canonical is also carrying patched versions of Mesa, xf86-video-ati, and xf86-video-nouveau for being able to support Mir/XMir in Ubuntu 13.10. The binary AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers also remain incompatible with Mir.

Well, we already knew that the proprietary video drivers were incompatible. Personally speaking, I stopped using proprietary video drivers more than a year ago. Too buggy for my liking. Nouveau does fine on my machine with Xserver or Xmir. But then again I am not about to buy the latest hardware, am I. So, it does not matter with me.

Regards.

[prodigy_]

The best possible consequence for the Linux community would be Canonical finally admitting Mir and Unity fiasco and discontinuing both. Sadly it's not going to happen.

[J._R._Menzie]

Unity is great now. I was one of the hater before but they have done a lot of work on it.

[codingman]

Sorry for being a fool, but what %exactly% is Mir?

[santosh83]

Sad decision by Intel to first release their driver with inbuilt support for XMir and then to revoke it, apparently a management decision. I hope the issues behind this get ironed out and we get the support of the major graphics manufacturers.

[codingman]

Psst... An Mir thread about this has already been made...

[coffeecat]

Threads merged.

[Gyokuro]

Sad decision by Intel to first release their driver with inbuilt support for XMir and then to revoke it, apparently a management decision. I hope the issues behind this get ironed out and we get the support of the major graphics manufacturers.

That is Canonicals part to support said hardware with a working driver as it is not a general linux graphic driver problem only a single distribution problem.

[santosh83]

That is Canonicals part to support said hardware with a working driver as it is not a general linux graphic driver problem only a single distribution problem.

Strictly speaking yes, but Intel is a giant compared to Canonical, and if they cared about the overall Linux ecosystem, surely maintaining a small patch would be a good altruistic intention right? After all, they know their driver the best. It's not that Intel isn't capable, but that ideologically they want community efforts to consolidate behind Wayland I suppose, since they've already invested time and effort in it, and this is one way to get the message across to the other hardware makers and distributions to get behind them in line, and begin to shun Mir. Who knows what the future will bring... I still hope we can have both Mir and Wayland both doing well, with the least possible fragmentation of both the underlying drivers as well as the overlying toolkits, GUIs etc, as cooperative diversity is the best thing for Linux. Neither having all the eggs in one basket, nor bitter and divisive fragmentation would help in the long run.