What came first Mir or Wayland?

[grier-devon]

So I read and hear about a lot of hate towards Mir saying that Ubuntu should be working with the community to help shape Wayland to something usable. I know Wayland came first in terms of existence but I also know there was really nothing to it before Mir so it just made sense to build something from scratch. Until Canonical announced Mir I did not here much buzz about other distro's or open source projects contributing to Wayland, was it Canonical's announcement of Mir which lit a fire under everyone else or where they actively working on Wayland and Canonical decided to go another route?

[deadflowr]

Wayland.

It's been in development for something like five years.

Mir's just around a year old.

Edit: I was answering the title.
Wayland has been in active development for quite sometime, and not just some dormant idea that woke up and started developing when mir came about.

All mir did was light a fire under the already existing devs working on wayland.

You look at the wayland live cd super thread
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1906762

[grier-devon]

Wayland.

It's been in development for something like five years.

Mir's just around a year old.

Edit: I was answering the title.
Wayland has been in active development for quite sometime, and not just some dormant idea that woke up and started developing when mir came about.

All mir did was light a fire under the already existing devs working on wayland.

You look at the wayland live cd super thread
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1906762

Thanks for the response, the thing that got me thinking about this was I watch the Linux Action Show every week and they use to give some props to Canonical for developing Mir but since they became Arch users it seems like all they do now is bash Canonical and Mir. I found this funny since before they where Arch users they talked about how Wayland was not even close so it made sense for Canonical to develop Mir.

[sffvba[e0rt]

Thanks for the response, the thing that got me thinking about this was I watch the Linux Action Show every week and they use to give some props to Canonical for developing Mir but since they became Arch users it seems like all they do now is bash Canonical and Mir. I found this funny since before they where Arch users they talked about how Wayland was not even close so it made sense for Canonical to develop Mir.

Where you stand depends on where you sit...


404

[cortman]

I would rather see them work on a project that all FOSS can benefit from, and with the input/assistance of a diversity of developers.

[grahammechanical]

This is what the KDE developers give as the reason to continue developing Kwin and not a new KDE weyland compositor


Starting a new Wayland compositor would mean to stop the work on the X11 window manager, [Kwin] which would be a bad move as we cannot know yet whether Wayland will succeed and will be supported on all hardware.

http://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland

MIR/Xmir is open source. so, it is for the benefit of any open source developer. It is not proprietary code.


On Ubuntu, we’re committed that every desktop environment perform well with Mir, either under X or directly. We didn’t press the ‘GO’ button on Mir until we were satisfied that the whole Ubuntu community, and other distributions, could easily benefit from the advantages of a leaner, cleaner graphics stack. We’re busy optimising performance for X now so that every app and every desktop environment will work really well in 13.10 under Mir, without having to make any changes. And we’re taking patches from people who want Mir to support capabilities they need for native, super-fast Mir access. Distributions should be able to provide Mir as an option for their users to experiment with very easily – the patch to X is very small (less than 500 lines).

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1269

Regards.

[RichardET]

Other than some wiki articles, which I have found, my background on Mir & Wayland is limited, but I would tend to support Mir simply because it appears that Mir will be designed to offer more security than Wayland does to wireless equipment such as smartphones and tablets. Beyond that I am distrustful of totally community based projects do to the crowding out mentality and I think this problem has limited the mass appeal of Linux for anything other than server applications. Everyone should realize that the two most popular open-source OS's are controlled by major companies - Apple & Google. The great community based OS's have had little impact on current computing, beyond feeding some trial code into their enterprise versions, which again, are controlled by major companies, such as RH. I used to be active on the opensuse forum, until I was permanently banned (I guess a free OS, is opposed to free speech), but one thread which is constantly running through that forum is a distrust of corporate based computing such as Novell & MS. The code sharing agreement between Novell & MS was considered heresy over there, but somehow they don't mind having RH being a major player with Wayland. Last I checked, RH was traded on the NYSC. Anyway, if Canonical prefers Mir to Wayland, that's great because Ubuntu will begin to crowd out distros like opensuse, and eventually they will adapt or fade, and will eventually have to support both Mir & Wayland, which by the way is a long term goal of Mir, anyway.

[cortman]

Everyone should realize that the two most popular open-source OS's are controlled by major companies - Apple & Google.

I hope this was just a typo- or else I'd like to see the source code for iOS. :confused:

[deadflowr]

I hope this was just a typo- or else I'd like to see the source code for iOS. :confused:

Didn't you know?
Apple is world famous for its openness.
just kidding.

I don't think any company rules over every aspect as closed and tightly as Apple.

[grier-devon]

not found, I get what you mean as I don't expect Arch users to agree with Canonical but I don't find it right for a person who uses Ubuntu one week then Arch the next to change philosophy on what is good and what is not.

cortman, I do agree with you how it would be awesome for Canonical to work in the community on Wayland since everyone would benefit, but the point of open source is if you don't like something or it does not work for your needs is to build something completely different or branch off. If that is how it was from the beginning wouldn't we only have one maybe two distributions, a desktop GUI to use and only one set of packages under the distribution? Mir and Wayland in my opinion is good, two options are better then one.

[RichardET]

I hope this was just a typo- or else I'd like to see the source code for iOS. :confused:

i was probably drunk at the time...but I was thinking of Darwin and OS/X.

I guess that I am an odd man here in the Linux world - I am a true leftie who does not think the most evil corporation in the world is MS
or even Apple. Like most of us, I use MS equipment daily and I used to have a G4 running the first version of OS/X about 13 years ago.

[dusanyu]

i was probably drunk at the time...but I was thinking of Darwin and OS/X.

I guess that I am an odd man here in the Linux world - I am a true leftie who does not think the most evil corporation in the world is MS
or even Apple. Like most of us, I use MS equipment daily and I used to have a G4 running the first version of OS/X about 13 years ago.

iOS does run on Darwin as well but the userland on both Mac OS and iOS are propriatary.

[su:bhatta]

i've got a question, actually 3 :):
Why is the display server being changed? Is anything wrong with Xorg? Or is Mir or Wayland or both are going to be something far better?
Please excuse my ignorance in the matter !

[deadflowr]

i've got a question, actually 3 :):
Why is the display server being changed? Is anything wrong with Xorg? Or is Mir or Wayland or both are going to be something far better?
Please excuse my ignorance in the matter !

It's old and wasn't built with the types of displays used today in mind, such as tablets and phone displays.
Plus it has a lot of functions that aren't even used anymore.

[su:bhatta]

It's old and wasn't built with the types of displays used today in mind, such as tablets and phone displays.
Plus it has a lot of functions that aren't even used anymore.

So today is a blue moon twice over! ;) you've actually helped me twice over today !

I guess I get the general idea!
so basically in linux there is no tested display driver for todays hardware eh !!

[deadflowr]

Remember that X11 is older than Linux by several years.
So instead of making the display server work with linux, they made linux work with the display server.

[su:bhatta]

Now this i know!
X11 came in eighties and linux only in 1992!
in fact deviantart gave a journal entry from linux addicts group about this being the 22nd year of Linux!

Strange, X11 haven't changed in nearly 35 years!

[deadflowr]

Here an interesting video of X/wayland developer Daniel Stone on X and wayland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44&noredirect=1

It is long.
But informative.

Edit: Oh and X11 is something like 25 years old.
35 years ago was the seventies still.

[su:bhatta]

Hey ! My Bad! simple wrong arithmatic !

[dusanyu]

Plus it has a lot of functions that aren't even used anymore. I wont target the rest but i need to point out this dreadful misnomer.

The feature most people point at as being "underused and pointless bloat" is X11's network capability (transparent if set up right) while it is true average Joe end user will never use this (as they never use most of UNIX like systems capabilities) it is still commonly used for secure remote administration via ssh tunneling you will even still see X11 based terminal and thin clients in some libraries, universities and scientific installations.

[Docaltmed]

you will even still see X11 based terminal and thin clients in some libraries, universities and scientific installations.

I was a journalist covering the minicomputer world when X windows debuted. I still remember all the "thin client" talk. It was the groove back then.

[lykwydchykyn]

The wayland FAQ (http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html) actually does a nice job of outlining why a new display server is needed, and what is wrong with X. Here's a fairly pithy excerpt for the casually curious:


What is wrong with X?

The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!). Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extensions such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE and to some extent phase out less useful extensions. But we can't ever get rid of the core rendering API and much other complexity that is rarely used in a modern desktop. With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to an optional code path. Getting to a point where the X server is a compatibility option instead of the core rendering system will take a while, but we'll never get there if don't plan for it.


Network transparency is actually used a lot, I don't think that's a good example of "unneeded features", it's just one that non-technical desktop users tend to latch onto because the real "unneeded features" are more esoteric.

[dusanyu]

I was a journalist covering the minicomputer world when X windows debuted. I still remember all the "thin client" talk. It was the groove back then.


Kindof like "Touch" and "The Cloud" these days both doomed to failure but this time will be relgated to the "What were they thinking" bin and not the "occasionaly seen" bin


and I get the point of wayland, I would dare say it is poised to be come "X12" but what in the heck is Mir for? why not just wait on Wayland to be done and stay compatable with every other GNU/Linux Desktop?