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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 Shutt

by 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?

by sweden 10y ago

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?