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FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Replace X11 with Mir or Wayland - DESCRIPTION: X11 is old, slow, and full of security issues. Mir, even in alpha, is much m

FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Replace X11 with Mir or Wayland - DESCRIPTION: X11 is old, slow, and full of security issues. Mir, even in alpha, is much more responsive and provies important 21st centry feature set. Wayland is already used by a major distro. X11 is that cobweb that's gone uncleaned in our closet for too long. - HEADLINE: Improve UI. - DESCRIPTION: When I use Ubuntu it's often easier to use the terminal then to learn the 10 different UIs to configure everything. This makes it impossible to convert specific people to using Ubuntu because they just don't have the time to learn all of the terminal-spells I know. Ideally there'd be a single place that could detect most configs for standard packages and a way to add hooks to that to get your package to show up in that menu. I don't know if this exists but if it does it's definetly not used. - ROLE/AFFILIATION: "Undergraduate Research Associate", I program and do sysadmin stuff for a department at my college.

billconan 10y ago
I +1 this one. ubuntu should be a force to push this forward.
drew-y 10y ago
I'd much prefer wayland over Mir. I know they're already set in their ways but wayland on fedora 25 works beautifully and has a way more reasonable license. It'd also be nice to have Ubuntu's support in continuing wayland adoption.
Qwertious 10y ago
The "X11 is full of security issues" is full if FUD, IME. Like, they say true-but-irrelevant-and-misleading statements like "any program running in an X11 server can view/alter any other program in the same X11 server, and Wayland fixes this" - this irrelevant because common security of practice, IIRC, is to run nested X11 servers and give each program its own. X11 also has a whole lot of commonly-used security/sandboxing extensions, but these are ignored in lieu of comparing vanilla X11 with vanilla Wayland, and pointing out that only the latter does security properly. Meanwhile, Wayland forces monolithic design, in requiring the panel, hotkey daemon, WM, etc to be built into the compositor. Essentially, each Wayland compositor is its own DE (not its own WM, despite common misconception). I want to see X11 die, but Wayland has some serious failures as an X11 replacement.
- lomnakkus 10y ago
  > this irrelevant because common security of practice, IIRC, is to run nested X11 servers and give each program its own. Really? I don't think I've ever seen such a setup.
  - mhall119 10y ago
    Yeah, that's not common at all. Plus doing so breaks a lot of things, like copy/paste, IIRC.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  > this irrelevant because common security of practice, IIRC, is to run nested X11 servers and give each program its own. If true that is a valid reason to drop it in my opinion.
Shorel 10y ago
You are preaching to the choir. They have been working on Mir for years now. I would vote for the contrary. First finish Mir and make sure that when the change happens, everything works as expected.
magicbuzz 10y ago
+1 I have a 2 yr old MacBook Pro. In OS X, window manager performs seamlessly using the Intel inbuilt graphics. On Ubuntu 16.10, the window manager is slow to the point of taking half a second to update window borders whatever the app. Makes doing responsive web design frustrating to the point of wanting to switch to another OS. I am really hoping that 17.04/Mir improves on this.
- asveikau 10y ago
  Have you tried another WM before blaming X? I spent the 90s watching X perform well on hardware that cannot handle OS X.

billconan 10y ago

I +1 this one. ubuntu should be a force to push this forward.

drew-y 10y ago

I'd much prefer wayland over Mir. I know they're already set in their ways but wayland on fedora 25 works beautifully and has a way more reasonable license. It'd also be nice to have Ubuntu's support in continuing wayland adoption.

Qwertious 10y ago

The "X11 is full of security issues" is full if FUD, IME. Like, they say true-but-irrelevant-and-misleading statements like "any program running in an X11 server can view/alter any other program in the same X11 server, and Wayland fixes this" - this irrelevant because common security of practice, IIRC, is to run nested X11 servers and give each program its own. X11 also has a whole lot of commonly-used security/sandboxing extensions, but these are ignored in lieu of comparing vanilla X11 with vanilla Wayland, and pointing out that only the latter does security properly. Meanwhile, Wayland forces monolithic design, in requiring the panel, hotkey daemon, WM, etc to be built into the compositor. Essentially, each Wayland compositor is its own DE (not its own WM, despite common misconception). I want to see X11 die, but Wayland has some serious failures as an X11 replacement.

lomnakkus 10y ago
> this irrelevant because common security of practice, IIRC, is to run nested X11 servers and give each program its own. Really? I don't think I've ever seen such a setup.
- mhall119 10y ago
  Yeah, that's not common at all. Plus doing so breaks a lot of things, like copy/paste, IIRC.
sqeaky 10y ago
> this irrelevant because common security of practice, IIRC, is to run nested X11 servers and give each program its own. If true that is a valid reason to drop it in my opinion.

Shorel 10y ago

You are preaching to the choir. They have been working on Mir for years now. I would vote for the contrary. First finish Mir and make sure that when the change happens, everything works as expected.

magicbuzz 10y ago

+1 I have a 2 yr old MacBook Pro. In OS X, window manager performs seamlessly using the Intel inbuilt graphics. On Ubuntu 16.10, the window manager is slow to the point of taking half a second to update window borders whatever the app. Makes doing responsive web design frustrating to the point of wanting to switch to another OS. I am really hoping that 17.04/Mir improves on this.

asveikau 10y ago
Have you tried another WM before blaming X? I spent the 90s watching X perform well on hardware that cannot handle OS X.