MIR will be the new display server, and Unity will be ported to Qt

[ZarathustraDK]

I wonder how this will work out for the Ubuntu derivatives. Will Kubuntu start using Mir + Kwin for example or will they 'simply' keep X and their own compositors?

KDE is Qt-based, so Mir + Kwin makes sense, considering a lot of Qt-compatibility-code must be made for Mir when Unity transfers from GTK to Qt/qml, I venture.

[Dry Lips]

Kristian Høgsberg's (Wayland guy) take on this:

https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts/jDq6BAgdpkG

[JDShu]

I agree with Kristian Høgsberg. This seems like a spectacularly bad idea and reeks of NIH. If Canonical can pull this off, that would be great - but that's like me saying if I can win an Olympic event, that would be great.

I'm not sure where Canonical's confidence in their ability to solve difficult a engineering problem without domain knowledge (evidently) comes from. To me it sounds a lot like arrogance.

[JDShu]

LOL crash and burn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir

[ZarathustraDK]

Hmmm... a lot of the friction seems to stem from Canonical's unwillingness to develop in the open (as in, everybody gets a say in what goes into the final product).

I don't know. When I read through all those googleplus-posts it seems like there's a schism between the "democratic" slow development of the community that often goes nowhere (gets stranded because nobody makes a call/has the inertia to make a call), and "Dictatorial" fast development Canonical offers by powering money and work-hours into it. Both have its strength and weaknesses. I can understand why Aaron is upset, seeing as he's sitting smack-dab in the middle of it, but I wouldn't equate that with him necessarily being right.

Again I'd say: As long as the code is open and free, I have no qualms with it. If Ubuntu HAS to play a dictator (someone that'll take a bold step with its inertia while the community bickers), then THAT (open source) is what will separate the benevolent king from the fachist madman. Heaven knows, Linus Torvalds are making these kind of far-reaching decisions on a regular basis, he just doesn't catch any flack because every distro is his "servant".

[alphacrucis2]

Hmmm... a lot of the friction seems to stem from Canonical's unwillingness to develop in the open (as in, everybody gets a say in what goes into the final product).

I don't know. When I read through all those googleplus-posts it seems like there's a schism between the "democratic" slow development of the community that often goes nowhere (gets stranded because nobody makes a call/has the inertia to make a call), and "Dictatorial" fast development Canonical offers by powering money and work-hours into it. Both have its strength and weaknesses. I can understand why Aaron is upset, seeing as he's sitting smack-dab in the middle of it, but I wouldn't equate that with him necessarily being right.

Again I'd say: As long as the code is open and free, I have no qualms with it. If Ubuntu HAS to play a dictator (someone that'll take a bold step with its inertia while the community bickers), then THAT (open source) is what will separate the benevolent king from the fachist madman. Heaven knows, Linus Torvalds are making these kind of far-reaching decisions on a regular basis, he just doesn't catch any flack because every distro is his "servant".

There's been nothing to stop Canonical engaging with the Wayland devs to influence the development and even make significant contributions but it appears they just decided to go their own way. Likely this decision was made quite a long time ago and we are just learning about it now.

[3rdalbum]

Wayland has been five years in development and you still can't run a desktop on it. It seems that the best you can do is run individual applications inside Weston, inside Virtualbox. Five years of development!

I don't think Canonical can afford to wait maybe another five years for Wayland to really be ready. If they can get Mir to run Unity, Qt5 and GTK 3 within the next 12 months they can get the benefits soon, and leapfrog Wayland.

Remember USB support on Linux. Two years into it, the team still had no usable code. Linus basically chucked it all out, started over, and wrote the USB stack in a couple of weeks. And it still works well. Sometimes, it just works better to get software usable quickly, and then add features to it later.

[BigCityCat]

My take is the community doesn't like it or it doesn't turn out how you like then use something else. Develop something else and make it better. I take a wait and see approach. I also have no problem with profits. People aren't entitled to a free product. I know a lot of people have contributed a lot and Ubuntu benefits from this. I guess people could question Ubuntu's contribution but marketing isn't cheap either. I had no idea what Linux was 5 years ago, then I heard about Ubuntu. Why because Ubuntu is marketing itself, and it's gonna take money to push it the next level. The community can not develop everything that makes Linux great quickly enough to be relevant. I know a lot of people would rather live in obscurity though. I'm interested to see where it goes. I hope it succeeds. I hope they stay true to the GPL and if they don't then we will move on and develop something else.

[glln0v]

I like that Canonical is talking about security/privacy as a reason for creating MIR. X has major security issues.

Based on Canonical's wiki, this sounds like an awesome plan. I just hope they can pull it off.

[buzzingrobot]

Canonical will take a lot of flack from parts of the development community for going its own way here, rather than simply patching X and/or Wayland.

As a user, though, I'm happy to see someone in open source try something new for a change, rather that stick with the conservative gradualism that we typically see.

I suspect Canonical has seen that relying on the efforts of others in the community who function independently of Canonical means it loses some degree of control of its products. This is the trade off that comes with cooperation and leveraging code in open source: You're often dependent on the code produced by people you can't control.

You can go it alone and still remain in harmony with open source tenets. But, you're likely to offend folks who find the communal aspect of open source at least as important as the code.