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

[castrojo]

Coupled with migration to Qt? Expect closed source proprietary "extensions" down the road.

Link?

[prodigy_]

Link?

\\gut-feeling\based-on\previous-experience

[glln0v]

This whole thing strikes me as a repeat of Unity-shell vs Gnome3-shell. After trying both out, I'm grateful that Canonical pushed ahead on Unity.

The thing I don't understand is how Kristian Høgsberg is saying that all the technical reasons for switching to MIR don't exist. The links I've read make it sound like he's saying you can already do everything Canonical is planning to do with MIR using Wayland. If true, this is wierd that Canonical is saying otherwise. I read previously that Canonical wasn't going to use GRUB2 because of some Secure-Boot legal concerns. Yet they came to this decision without even talking to FSF. This is bizarre. Is Canonical mistaken about Wayland capabilities? Have they talked to Wayland developers about their concerns?

I'm just a non-technical outsider looking in, reading the blogs and such. This is the picture and questions I'm left with.

I hope Canonical can pull off the Unity vision/convergeance. Other than some serious privacy concerns with the DASH sending my personal information elsewhere, I really like the Unity environment. My hope is that they make privacy/security a top-focus from here on out so users get the benefit on all form factors (Desktop, Phone, Tablet, TV).

[mr john]

"we cannot control that other project so we create our own"

Our distro, our choice. Well, really Marks choice, as Ubuntu isn't a democracy.

[ZarathustraDK]

Quoted from the Mir-spec page:

Why Not Wayland / Weston?

An obvious clarification first: Wayland is a protocol definition that defines how a client application should talk to a compositor component. It touches areas like surface creation/destruction, graphics buffer allocation/management, input event handling and a rough prototype for the integration of shell components. However, our evaluation of the protocol definition revealed that the Wayland protocol does not meet our requirements. First, we are aiming for a more extensible input event handling that takes future developments like 3D input devices (e.g. Leap Motion) into account. Please note though that Wayland's input event handling does not suffer from the security issues introduced by X's input event handling semantics (thanks to Daniel Stone and Kristian Høgsberg for pointing this out). With respect to mobile use-cases, we think that the handling of input methods should be reflected in the display server protocol, too. As another example, we consider the shell integration parts of the protocol as privileged and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the client facing protocol.

However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but due to our different requirements we decided to go for the following architecture w.r.t. to protocol-integration:

A protocol-agnostic inner core that is extremely well-defined, well-tested and portable.
An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols.
In summary, we have not chosen Wayland/Weston as our basis for delivering a next-generation user experience as it does not fulfill our requirements completely. More to this, with our protocol- and platform-agnostic approach, we can make sure that we reach our goal of a consistent and beautiful user experience across platforms and device form factors. However, Wayland support could be added either by providing a Wayland-specific frontend implementation for our display server or by providing a client-side implementation of libwayland that ultimately talks to Mir.

As I understand it, there are some basic, structural differences with regards to Wayland from Canonicals POV (read: what they're intending to use it for, not that the project itself is completely bunk).

[ZarathustraDK]

...aaaaaaand here's the first prototype in action with working desktop, on a tablet: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/u...s-demoed-video

I could get used to this steady stream of rabbits getting pulled out of the hat

[CarpKing]

If Wayland wasn't quite capable of what they wanted to do, they should have contributed until it was. If their ideas got rejected, then maybe they would be justified in going their own way. Instead they just made their own thing without telling anyone their issues beforehand. This whole thing wreaks of NIH syndrome. First the DE (also various smaller pieces I guess), now the display server. I suppose the next step is writing their own kernel.

Distro-hoppers, how is Debian looking these days?

[mamamia88]

If Wayland wasn't quite capable of what they wanted to do, they should have contributed until it was. If their ideas got rejected, then maybe they would be justified in going their own way. Instead they just made their own thing without telling anyone their issues beforehand. This whole thing wreaks of NIH syndrome. First the DE (also various smaller pieces I guess), now the display server. I suppose the next step is writing their own kernel.

Distro-hoppers, how is Debian looking these days?

Exactly they would have probably got there quicker by cooperating with others and donating time and money to bring it up to snuff rather than starting from ground zero. That being said they can do what they want and I look forward to testing it out.

[Dry Lips]

What do you think about these articles:


http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNzc

and

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

[iamkuriouspurpleoranj]

Debian 7 will go stable any time in the next 6 months. People say it's imminent but in fact the Debian project is currently having difficulty squashing bugs. Really, if anyone here is able to help out, they need you over at Debian.