4 ms·

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 do

by 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.
  - Etzos 10y ago
    It's not that people chose not to believe this, it's that the whole point doesn't make sense at all when looked at in detail. When asked to provide specific technical reasons for the existence of Mir beyond the nebulous ones stated in the article, Canonical was unable to list anything of any real value. Input was one of the things mentioned, but in the end they ended up going with the Wayland solution (libinput). The whole point of Mir's existence, that is a goal of convergence across several form factors, is also filled perfectly by Wayland. Mir provided no advantages over Wayland for that goal. This is kind of frustrating because Canonical spent time working on a system which provided almost exactly the same thing as Wayland instead of contributing to Wayland. And that alone may not have been that bad if they had been open about it, but Mir development happened in the dark for a long time prior to announcement and when it finally was announced Canonical listed off a bunch of issues they had with Wayland which they had never even brought up with the Wayland developers. All that would probably still be okay if at the end Mir offered something over Wayland, but that's just not the case. Even now there doesn't seem to be any technical reason for Mir to exist or have existed at all.
- hedora 10y ago
  There have been some significant threats to open source projects recently. In fact, I'd say they've dominated and negated whatever recent progress has been made toward making linux usable on desktops/laptops. Systemd broke tons of stuff, apparently permanently, unless you're willing to switch distros. Similarly, wayland and mir apparently will eventually break the window manager I run (which was written over a decade ago, and still works better for me than the alternatives). From this article, is sounds like Mir would have broken it even more by making it harder to reproduce the existing functionality. The real kicker is projects like Unity and Gnome 3, which broke the parts of my laptop workflow that relied on a few modular parts of gnome 2. (Including selecting wifi, Bluetooth and audio settings) I've had to resort to re-learning forgotten command line utilities. (Unity was always unusable, and Gnome 3 was broken on Ubuntu because NIH, so those aren't viable options either). I can't be the only one with this problem. If I were, Mint wouldn't constantly be at the top of distrowatch.
  - bkor 10y ago
    > Systemd broke tons of stuff It works just fine on many distributions. > Similarly, wayland and mir apparently will eventually break the window manager No they won't. E.g. any DE still relies on Xwayland (often impossible to run pure Wayland). So basically relying on X11. You're making things up. > relied on a few modular parts of gnome 2. (Including selecting wifi, Bluetooth and audio settings I can change wifi, Bluetooth and my audio just fine. Please be more specific. For the things you give some detail it seems things I've never seen before (else would've noticed the 1000s of bugreports). For others your problems are vague "broke tons of stuff": huh?
sametmax 10y ago
I never saw things like this. Usually "competition" in the Foss market is not really a thing. But now that you mention it, it's true that wayland was stagnating and that when Mir arrived, everything accelerated. Sometime having a common enemy is a good motivator.
- Etzos 10y ago
  > But now that you mention it, it's true that wayland was stagnating and that when Mir arrived, everything accelerated. Sometime having a common enemy is a good motivator. This seems to be something a lot of people believe, but when you look at the history of it all it's really not the case.[1] I have a feeling it's because the controversy sparked a number of articles which talked about things in a more public way which made it feel like Wayland was suddenly making progress after stagnation, while in actuality development pace was chugging along as it always had been. [1] Canonical announced Mir early 2013[2], you'll notice there is no great spike around that time in any of: [1a] the Wayland repo https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland/graphs/code-frequ... [1b] the weston repo: https://github.com/wayland-project/weston/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/wayland-project/weston/graphs/code-freque... [2] 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...
  - sametmax 10y ago
    It's not about development, more about supports from integrators.
    - Etzos 10y ago
      This is also in a similar boat. I'm having a hard time pinning down anything of any serious relevance from the GNOME/GTK side of things, but there is this[1] which shows that they had planned work on Wayland prior to the Mir announcement. It looks like they started actual work on it some time in 2013 which may look like it increased because of Mir, but I would tend to think that's more coincidence based on their prior plans. From the Qt/KDE side of things we have work on QtWayland[2] and work on Plasma/KWin[3]. The former had development increase as work on Wayland continued and follows a general upward trend, especially after Plasma started using it. For the latter, the article covers the timeline pretty clearly. From what I can tell my point still stands, even when talking about support from integrators. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/WaylandHackfest2012 https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/WaylandHackfest2012 [2] https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/graphs/code-frequency the spike you see happened Jan/Feb which was prior to the Mir announcement and if you check the number of commits there was no major increase at that time [3] http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/04/the-history-on-wayland-support-inside-kwin/ http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/04/the-history-on...
bkor 10y ago
> The only good thing Mir brought to the world was competition Not true at all. Various years before Mir started, Canonical publicly said the future was Wayland. Canonical promised to do some work on Wayland. They started Mir, didn't do that work, then 6-9 months later announced Mir. They delayed that work for 6-9 months due to keeping Mir a secret. There's NO speedup due to this. It caused delays. Wayland was already at 1.0 by the time Mir was announced. However, that 1.0 was for basic things. After this it needed desktop environment standards. That's what the various desktop environments needed to work on. Initially that was GNOME, Enlightenment and KDE. Due to those agreements you could finally actually see the results of many years of work. Practically though, things could've been faster with Canonical also joining in (making/agreeing/discussing standards, etc).
- eptcyka 10y ago
  That is the point, they stated publicly that Wayland was the future, which was a dick move. However, while wayland was at 1.0 by the time they announced Mir, Gnome and KDE were far from using Wayland in production. Even today, I do not use Wayland on Gnome because it doesn't support hot reloading of the compositor, Intel's work on bringing a native Wayland frontend to Chromium is MIA. But I guess my contemporary gripes with Wayland have nothing to do with Mir and everything to do with the fact that Wayland was just a protocol that a number of independent parties had to agree upon and implement correctly. Even today, Nvidia doesn't want to play ball when it comes to Wayland compositors interfacing with their proprietary drivers. Whilst commit frequency does not display this, I still believe that developing Wayland was taken more seriously after Mir was announced. This is however my suboptimal opinion, and I am willing to concede that I am wrong and discuss the matter further.

by eptcyka 10y ago

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.
- Etzos 10y ago
  It's not that people chose not to believe this, it's that the whole point doesn't make sense at all when looked at in detail. When asked to provide specific technical reasons for the existence of Mir beyond the nebulous ones stated in the article, Canonical was unable to list anything of any real value. Input was one of the things mentioned, but in the end they ended up going with the Wayland solution (libinput). The whole point of Mir's existence, that is a goal of convergence across several form factors, is also filled perfectly by Wayland. Mir provided no advantages over Wayland for that goal. This is kind of frustrating because Canonical spent time working on a system which provided almost exactly the same thing as Wayland instead of contributing to Wayland. And that alone may not have been that bad if they had been open about it, but Mir development happened in the dark for a long time prior to announcement and when it finally was announced Canonical listed off a bunch of issues they had with Wayland which they had never even brought up with the Wayland developers. All that would probably still be okay if at the end Mir offered something over Wayland, but that's just not the case. Even now there doesn't seem to be any technical reason for Mir to exist or have existed at all.
hedora 10y ago
There have been some significant threats to open source projects recently. In fact, I'd say they've dominated and negated whatever recent progress has been made toward making linux usable on desktops/laptops. Systemd broke tons of stuff, apparently permanently, unless you're willing to switch distros. Similarly, wayland and mir apparently will eventually break the window manager I run (which was written over a decade ago, and still works better for me than the alternatives). From this article, is sounds like Mir would have broken it even more by making it harder to reproduce the existing functionality. The real kicker is projects like Unity and Gnome 3, which broke the parts of my laptop workflow that relied on a few modular parts of gnome 2. (Including selecting wifi, Bluetooth and audio settings) I've had to resort to re-learning forgotten command line utilities. (Unity was always unusable, and Gnome 3 was broken on Ubuntu because NIH, so those aren't viable options either). I can't be the only one with this problem. If I were, Mint wouldn't constantly be at the top of distrowatch.
- bkor 10y ago
  > Systemd broke tons of stuff It works just fine on many distributions. > Similarly, wayland and mir apparently will eventually break the window manager No they won't. E.g. any DE still relies on Xwayland (often impossible to run pure Wayland). So basically relying on X11. You're making things up. > relied on a few modular parts of gnome 2. (Including selecting wifi, Bluetooth and audio settings I can change wifi, Bluetooth and my audio just fine. Please be more specific. For the things you give some detail it seems things I've never seen before (else would've noticed the 1000s of bugreports). For others your problems are vague "broke tons of stuff": huh?

sametmax 10y ago

I never saw things like this. Usually "competition" in the Foss market is not really a thing. But now that you mention it, it's true that wayland was stagnating and that when Mir arrived, everything accelerated. Sometime having a common enemy is a good motivator.

Etzos 10y ago
> But now that you mention it, it's true that wayland was stagnating and that when Mir arrived, everything accelerated. Sometime having a common enemy is a good motivator. This seems to be something a lot of people believe, but when you look at the history of it all it's really not the case.[1] I have a feeling it's because the controversy sparked a number of articles which talked about things in a more public way which made it feel like Wayland was suddenly making progress after stagnation, while in actuality development pace was chugging along as it always had been. [1] Canonical announced Mir early 2013[2], you'll notice there is no great spike around that time in any of: [1a] the Wayland repo https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland/graphs/code-frequ... [1b] the weston repo: https://github.com/wayland-project/weston/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/wayland-project/weston/graphs/code-freque... [2] 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...
- sametmax 10y ago
  It's not about development, more about supports from integrators.
  - Etzos 10y ago
    This is also in a similar boat. I'm having a hard time pinning down anything of any serious relevance from the GNOME/GTK side of things, but there is this[1] which shows that they had planned work on Wayland prior to the Mir announcement. It looks like they started actual work on it some time in 2013 which may look like it increased because of Mir, but I would tend to think that's more coincidence based on their prior plans. From the Qt/KDE side of things we have work on QtWayland[2] and work on Plasma/KWin[3]. The former had development increase as work on Wayland continued and follows a general upward trend, especially after Plasma started using it. For the latter, the article covers the timeline pretty clearly. From what I can tell my point still stands, even when talking about support from integrators. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/WaylandHackfest2012 https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/WaylandHackfest2012 [2] https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/graphs/code-frequency https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/graphs/code-frequency the spike you see happened Jan/Feb which was prior to the Mir announcement and if you check the number of commits there was no major increase at that time [3] http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/04/the-history-on-wayland-support-inside-kwin/ http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/04/the-history-on...

bkor 10y ago

> The only good thing Mir brought to the world was competition Not true at all. Various years before Mir started, Canonical publicly said the future was Wayland. Canonical promised to do some work on Wayland. They started Mir, didn't do that work, then 6-9 months later announced Mir. They delayed that work for 6-9 months due to keeping Mir a secret. There's NO speedup due to this. It caused delays. Wayland was already at 1.0 by the time Mir was announced. However, that 1.0 was for basic things. After this it needed desktop environment standards. That's what the various desktop environments needed to work on. Initially that was GNOME, Enlightenment and KDE. Due to those agreements you could finally actually see the results of many years of work. Practically though, things could've been faster with Canonical also joining in (making/agreeing/discussing standards, etc).

eptcyka 10y ago
That is the point, they stated publicly that Wayland was the future, which was a dick move. However, while wayland was at 1.0 by the time they announced Mir, Gnome and KDE were far from using Wayland in production. Even today, I do not use Wayland on Gnome because it doesn't support hot reloading of the compositor, Intel's work on bringing a native Wayland frontend to Chromium is MIA. But I guess my contemporary gripes with Wayland have nothing to do with Mir and everything to do with the fact that Wayland was just a protocol that a number of independent parties had to agree upon and implement correctly. Even today, Nvidia doesn't want to play ball when it comes to Wayland compositors interfacing with their proprietary drivers. Whilst commit frequency does not display this, I still believe that developing Wayland was taken more seriously after Mir was announced. This is however my suboptimal opinion, and I am willing to concede that I am wrong and discuss the matter further.