6 ms·

Why Mir

47 points by dbcooper 10y ago

unwind 10y ago
Is this blogspam? It's a blog post about a blog post. The actual blog post from the developer in question is at Canonical: http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/12/why-mir/ http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/12/why-mi....
- mathw 10y ago
  Yup, that's the link that should have been posted. Phoronix added nothing useful to a fairly sparse article.
phkahler 10y ago
The question has never been "Why Mir?", but rather "Why Mir instead of Wayland?" and I don't think they've ever really addressed that. Looking back, the one thing I do remember is that Mir was going to work with the closed source nVidia driver where the Wayland guys just said "this is the future and nVidia needs to make some accommodations or they won't get to play". I don't recall the details, but nVidia waited until the future was inevitable and then came around - and I can't blame them for waiting, given how long it actually took it could have been a waste of effort. Edit: those are not direct quotes by any means.
- j0lly 10y ago
  Why not both? I want to use Mir instead of Wayland, who are you to tell me what to use?
  - addicted 10y ago
    I see you've been downvoted, but the hatred towards Mir (instead of Wayland!) in a world where there are a million Linux distributions, and the idea that you could always switch to a different app/driver/OS/distribution/window manager/etc. has always been pushed as a strength of the platform clearly indicates that there was more to it, whether the people who hated on Mir knew it or not.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      There are strong voices clamoring for a single, canonical (heh) distro. Or if not a single distro then a system for isolating the particulars of any odd distro from the mind of the "app" (groan) developers.
      - addicted 10y ago
        But they're almost certainly a fraction of those that spoke loudly against Mir. [Unless the Mir haters are not as large in number, but merely a lot louder]
        digi_owl 9y ago
        In recent years i wonder if the net has become the playground of "griefers". Meaning people that exploit the pseudonymity of the net to sling vitriol at any and all topics that catch their attention. Thus it becomes hard to tell how many are actually in disagreement. It may well have started with Anonymous, but turned nasty somewhere around Gamersgate.
      - pekk 10y ago
        Or maybe instead of a distro, we could define certain conventions for interoperability that all distributions had to follow. We could call it the "Linux Standard Base." But looking into my crystal ball, it might not work out well if certain companies flex too much control to define the Linux Standard Base as being essentially their own distribution without any real compromise.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    You can have both if both eventually exists. The problem is that a graphic server is a really hard software to make, integrate and maintain. We kept X for decades for this reason. Trying to build and make a standard of a new one is hard enough. Spending resources for a 3rd one, that we all knew has less chance of succeeding, was considered a waste by many. As a community, some like me analyzed that Mir was a bad strategic move and just said it. There is nothing wrong with expressing this opinion. It's not stealing your freedom away. Turns out we were right. Mir was too big of a project to chew for canonical, and the effort, that could have been invested in getting a better wayland sooner, was wasted. This is a repeating problem in open source. It's hard to find the balance between innovation and playing as a team. Given the fantastic track record of canonical though, we can't blame them. They tried. I'm glad they have this spirit, they made the Linux desktop better. I'm also glad the Mir fad is over.
    - justin66 10y ago
      Fragmentation isn't just a repeating problem in open source, it's a repeating problem for Unix.
      - baldfat 10y ago
        > Fragmentation I have learned to hate this term. Sometimes it means choice other times it means different solutions to the same problem. I much rather have choice then be placed in a box. > repeating problem in open source, it's a repeating problem for Unix Since Open Source and Linux aka *Unix has won I fail to see your point. The big issue was they went with their own solution and didn't add to Wayland which is something they could have done this wasn't fragmentation. "When Mir was started we needed a mechanism for client-server communications (and Wayland wasn’t in the state it is today). We did something that worked well enough (libmirclient) and, because it’s just a small, intentionally isolated part of the whole, we could change later."
        sametmax 10y ago
        But there is such a thing as the paradox of choices. This is a big problem on Linux because if you want to do a software, you first have to handle this diversity for UI, bus communication, configuration storage, dir layouts, init systems, packaging... It's a nightmare. Compare to releasing the same thing for windows or mac. Starting Mir after and if investing on Wayland failed would have been much wiser.
  - Qantourisc 10y ago
    Personally I would say, we have little room for it. Not to mention commercial driver vendors ...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - baldfat 10y ago
    Because we see that Wayland is an extremely difficult project that takes the community as a whole to make it the best. Why do we need multiple of projects (By developers) to replace one project (X 11)? This has taken 10 years longer then it should have already and Mir doesn't have a declared reason why to separate from the community and do it's own alternative and how it would help all of Linux.
  - gribbly 10y ago
    No one prevented Canonical from making Mir, hence it's existence. Likewise no one outside Canonical bothered to support Mir, because it offered no advantages over Wayland. If you want to use Mir, go ahead, that doesn't mean anyone owes you support.
  - bluGill 10y ago
    You can use whatever you want. However as a framework/window manager maintainer I have to make a choice. Adding support for one takes years: I do not have time to add a second. I choose wayland because the people behind wayland worked on X for years and designed wayland to fix real design issues in X (as opposed to imagined design issues in X which most previous X replacements looked at), so I trust them. I don't have any reason to believe the people behind mir know what they are doing. Sure you can use both, but if you choose mir you are limited to just the applications ubuntu chooses to provide. If you choose wayland, you get almost everything else because all the toolkits all choose wayland. * I'm not actually a framework or window manager maintainer. I follow their blogs though, and this is essentially what they say.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Perusing Wikipedia's references regarding Mir, i came across a series of blog articles that may help enlighten us all. http://blog.cooperteam.net/search/label/mir http://blog.cooperteam.net/search/label/mir Seems they were originally G+ postings, btw.
JBReefer 10y ago
This is an odd posting. It's a (very) short history of the reasoning behind and purpose of the Mir project at Canonical, but doesn't hint at the future of the project or the team. It's a dictionary definition more or less, but the timing seems like it has a great deal of meaning (in the wake of the Unity abandonment).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Symmetry 10y ago
  The previous post had a bit more info. http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/11/a-new-hope/ http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/11/a-new-...
  - qznc 10y ago
    That one actually makes sense. It states that there are issues with Mir and Snap/FlatPack packaging. It ponders its future and to use libwayland within Mir.
eptcyka 10y ago
The only good thing Mir brought to the world was competition. As soon as Canonical announced that they had been working on Mir for a year, everyone and their dogs jumped on making Wayland a success. And Canonical has to be commended for this. Even if it was hugely unethical of them, as whilst they were developing Mir in secret, they had publicly stated that they will fully commit to Wayland.
- sweden 10y ago
  Nobody jumped on anything when Canonical announced Mir. The only thing that happened is that the world asked a bunch of questions to Canonical and to Mark Shuttleworth and no one was able to explain exactly "Why Mir?". In fact, not even this blog post. Mir was not a threat, in fact, thinking about "threats" in open source is so silly. It is not even suppose to be a competition.
  - 0xFFC 10y ago
    As someone who used Fedora for long time, I completely agree with that evaluation, I did see how fedora/redhat community jumped and pushed as hard as they can to bring wayland to fedora as soon as possible (the same wayland was in pipeline for long long time).
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      I may have ragged on RH in the past, but sometimes i wonder if RH/Fedora is the dog being wagged by the tail. The tail being Freedesktop and Gnome related projects and their devs (that sadly more often than not are employees at RH for various reasons). This noted in how Fedora maintainers will often clash with those project devs, while RH basically sits and skims Fedora at intervals to form RHEL (freezing the state of Fedora at that point in time, and applying backports of various fixes etc). Meaning that RH/Fedora, being the big dog in the distro pack, gets used by certain developers to ram through their agenda no matter if the larger Linux community wants it or not.
  - addicted 10y ago
    The answer was fairly clearly stated right from the beginning. [quote]Canonical chose the latter., with Mir built specifically to meet the aims and goals of Unity.[/quote] Where the goals of Unity was convergence across all platforms. http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/canonical-announce-custom-display-server-mir-not-wayland-not-x http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/canonical-announce-custom... A lot of people chose not to believe this, but it doesn't change the fact that the Ubuntu team clearly articulated that they thought that their goal of convergence across several form factors required a new display server which was focused more on that than Wayland.
GnwbZHiU 10y ago
Canonical stop supporting Unity. I guess it will stop supporting Mir as well

47 points by dbcooper 10y ago

Is this blogspam? It's a blog post about a blog post. The actual blog post from the developer in question is at Canonical: http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/12/why-mir/ http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/12/why-mi....

mathw 10y ago
Yup, that's the link that should have been posted. Phoronix added nothing useful to a fairly sparse article.

phkahler 10y ago

The question has never been "Why Mir?", but rather "Why Mir instead of Wayland?" and I don't think they've ever really addressed that. Looking back, the one thing I do remember is that Mir was going to work with the closed source nVidia driver where the Wayland guys just said "this is the future and nVidia needs to make some accommodations or they won't get to play". I don't recall the details, but nVidia waited until the future was inevitable and then came around - and I can't blame them for waiting, given how long it actually took it could have been a waste of effort. Edit: those are not direct quotes by any means.

j0lly 10y ago
Why not both? I want to use Mir instead of Wayland, who are you to tell me what to use?
- addicted 10y ago
  I see you've been downvoted, but the hatred towards Mir (instead of Wayland!) in a world where there are a million Linux distributions, and the idea that you could always switch to a different app/driver/OS/distribution/window manager/etc. has always been pushed as a strength of the platform clearly indicates that there was more to it, whether the people who hated on Mir knew it or not.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    There are strong voices clamoring for a single, canonical (heh) distro. Or if not a single distro then a system for isolating the particulars of any odd distro from the mind of the "app" (groan) developers.
    - addicted 10y ago
      But they're almost certainly a fraction of those that spoke loudly against Mir. [Unless the Mir haters are not as large in number, but merely a lot louder]
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        In recent years i wonder if the net has become the playground of "griefers". Meaning people that exploit the pseudonymity of the net to sling vitriol at any and all topics that catch their attention. Thus it becomes hard to tell how many are actually in disagreement. It may well have started with Anonymous, but turned nasty somewhere around Gamersgate.
    - pekk 10y ago
      Or maybe instead of a distro, we could define certain conventions for interoperability that all distributions had to follow. We could call it the "Linux Standard Base." But looking into my crystal ball, it might not work out well if certain companies flex too much control to define the Linux Standard Base as being essentially their own distribution without any real compromise.
- sametmax 10y ago
  You can have both if both eventually exists. The problem is that a graphic server is a really hard software to make, integrate and maintain. We kept X for decades for this reason. Trying to build and make a standard of a new one is hard enough. Spending resources for a 3rd one, that we all knew has less chance of succeeding, was considered a waste by many. As a community, some like me analyzed that Mir was a bad strategic move and just said it. There is nothing wrong with expressing this opinion. It's not stealing your freedom away. Turns out we were right. Mir was too big of a project to chew for canonical, and the effort, that could have been invested in getting a better wayland sooner, was wasted. This is a repeating problem in open source. It's hard to find the balance between innovation and playing as a team. Given the fantastic track record of canonical though, we can't blame them. They tried. I'm glad they have this spirit, they made the Linux desktop better. I'm also glad the Mir fad is over.
  - justin66 10y ago
    Fragmentation isn't just a repeating problem in open source, it's a repeating problem for Unix.
    - baldfat 10y ago
      > Fragmentation I have learned to hate this term. Sometimes it means choice other times it means different solutions to the same problem. I much rather have choice then be placed in a box. > repeating problem in open source, it's a repeating problem for Unix Since Open Source and Linux aka *Unix has won I fail to see your point. The big issue was they went with their own solution and didn't add to Wayland which is something they could have done this wasn't fragmentation. "When Mir was started we needed a mechanism for client-server communications (and Wayland wasn’t in the state it is today). We did something that worked well enough (libmirclient) and, because it’s just a small, intentionally isolated part of the whole, we could change later."
      - sametmax 10y ago
        But there is such a thing as the paradox of choices. This is a big problem on Linux because if you want to do a software, you first have to handle this diversity for UI, bus communication, configuration storage, dir layouts, init systems, packaging... It's a nightmare. Compare to releasing the same thing for windows or mac. Starting Mir after and if investing on Wayland failed would have been much wiser.
- Qantourisc 10y ago
  Personally I would say, we have little room for it. Not to mention commercial driver vendors ...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- baldfat 10y ago
  Because we see that Wayland is an extremely difficult project that takes the community as a whole to make it the best. Why do we need multiple of projects (By developers) to replace one project (X 11)? This has taken 10 years longer then it should have already and Mir doesn't have a declared reason why to separate from the community and do it's own alternative and how it would help all of Linux.
- gribbly 10y ago
  No one prevented Canonical from making Mir, hence it's existence. Likewise no one outside Canonical bothered to support Mir, because it offered no advantages over Wayland. If you want to use Mir, go ahead, that doesn't mean anyone owes you support.
- bluGill 10y ago
  You can use whatever you want. However as a framework/window manager maintainer I have to make a choice. Adding support for one takes years: I do not have time to add a second. I choose wayland because the people behind wayland worked on X for years and designed wayland to fix real design issues in X (as opposed to imagined design issues in X which most previous X replacements looked at), so I trust them. I don't have any reason to believe the people behind mir know what they are doing. Sure you can use both, but if you choose mir you are limited to just the applications ubuntu chooses to provide. If you choose wayland, you get almost everything else because all the toolkits all choose wayland. * I'm not actually a framework or window manager maintainer. I follow their blogs though, and this is essentially what they say.
digi_owl 10y ago
Perusing Wikipedia's references regarding Mir, i came across a series of blog articles that may help enlighten us all. http://blog.cooperteam.net/search/label/mir http://blog.cooperteam.net/search/label/mir Seems they were originally G+ postings, btw.

JBReefer 10y ago

This is an odd posting. It's a (very) short history of the reasoning behind and purpose of the Mir project at Canonical, but doesn't hint at the future of the project or the team. It's a dictionary definition more or less, but the timing seems like it has a great deal of meaning (in the wake of the Unity abandonment).

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Symmetry 10y ago
The previous post had a bit more info. http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/11/a-new-hope/ http://voices.canonical.com/alan.griffiths/2017/04/11/a-new-...
- qznc 10y ago
  That one actually makes sense. It states that there are issues with Mir and Snap/FlatPack packaging. It ponders its future and to use libwayland within Mir.

eptcyka 10y ago

The only good thing Mir brought to the world was competition. As soon as Canonical announced that they had been working on Mir for a year, everyone and their dogs jumped on making Wayland a success. And Canonical has to be commended for this. Even if it was hugely unethical of them, as whilst they were developing Mir in secret, they had publicly stated that they will fully commit to Wayland.

sweden 10y ago
Nobody jumped on anything when Canonical announced Mir. The only thing that happened is that the world asked a bunch of questions to Canonical and to Mark Shuttleworth and no one was able to explain exactly "Why Mir?". In fact, not even this blog post. Mir was not a threat, in fact, thinking about "threats" in open source is so silly. It is not even suppose to be a competition.
- 0xFFC 10y ago
  As someone who used Fedora for long time, I completely agree with that evaluation, I did see how fedora/redhat community jumped and pushed as hard as they can to bring wayland to fedora as soon as possible (the same wayland was in pipeline for long long time).
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I may have ragged on RH in the past, but sometimes i wonder if RH/Fedora is the dog being wagged by the tail. The tail being Freedesktop and Gnome related projects and their devs (that sadly more often than not are employees at RH for various reasons). This noted in how Fedora maintainers will often clash with those project devs, while RH basically sits and skims Fedora at intervals to form RHEL (freezing the state of Fedora at that point in time, and applying backports of various fixes etc). Meaning that RH/Fedora, being the big dog in the distro pack, gets used by certain developers to ram through their agenda no matter if the larger Linux community wants it or not.
- addicted 10y ago
  The answer was fairly clearly stated right from the beginning. [quote]Canonical chose the latter., with Mir built specifically to meet the aims and goals of Unity.[/quote] Where the goals of Unity was convergence across all platforms. http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/canonical-announce-custom-display-server-mir-not-wayland-not-x http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/03/canonical-announce-custom... A lot of people chose not to believe this, but it doesn't change the fact that the Ubuntu team clearly articulated that they thought that their goal of convergence across several form factors required a new display server which was focused more on that than Wayland.

GnwbZHiU 10y ago

Canonical stop supporting Unity. I guess it will stop supporting Mir as well