5 ms·

Mir’s next steps – we need your input

57 points by rippsu 9y ago

shmerl 9y ago
So Mir will become a Wayland compositor?
- Laaas 9y ago
  Yes
snvzz 9y ago
Wayland was already there, and there was nothing wrong with it. OK, maybe there was, but not the bullshit you made up to justify your NiH syndrome alternative. Mir was pointless. Drop it. It should never have existed in the first place.
- shmerl 9y ago
  If I understand correctly, they'll drop the server part replacing it with Wayland. But they'll keep their compositor, which any Wayland based DE needs to implement anyway. They don't intended it for the desktop, since they are dropping Unity. It's for IoT and etc.
  - simion314 9y ago
    They can't replace something with Wayland because Wayland is a protocol and interface, Mir needs to implement code to speak that protocol.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - shmerl 9y ago
      OK, then they are replacing the compositor and changing their client, rewriting it to talk in Wayland protocol.
      - simion314 9y ago
        They are no removing a Mir component and add a Wayland component, they implement the Wayland protocol on top of existing code, maybe refactoring where it is needed, so Mir could talk wayland and still do the Mir stuff that is needed for IoT.
  - DC-3 9y ago
    I hardly think that Mutter is the be-all and end-all of Wayland compositor performance. I could see Ubunu plumbing a re-moulded Mir back into their distribution further down the line (while keeping the rest of the GNOME environment). I'm not certain on the technical details, but I believe this should be possibly; for Wayland was certainly designed with compositor agnosticism in mind. Edit: reading further, it appears that GNOME Shell is quite tightly woven into Mutter, which may well complicate matters.
    - simion314 9y ago
      GNOME devs realized already that they have problems with the current architecture, I think X got the blame though this time too, so they plan a GNOME4 version, I do not know if they started coding it or are just in planing phase.
- simion314 9y ago
  Wayland is a protocol, Mir will use this protocol, I think you are not uptodate with what is happening here.
  - wmf 9y ago
    What does Mir offer compared to Weston? It still sounds pretty NIH.
    - simion314 9y ago
      Nobody uses Weston, Weston is like the reference thing, each DE is implementing their own compositor. Some DE like Mate hope they can use Mir and so get an easy way to add Wayland support. Ubuntu uses Gnome now so they use Mutter for wayland, Mir would be use for IoT and other non desktop platforms nd there is the possibility that others DE would use it.
    - folknor 9y ago
      I don't think the guy who posted this works for Canonical at the moment. If he does, his launchpad page is very sparse compared to other employees. I'm not saying that to disparage him in any way, but because it would make it incompatible with a not-invented-here syndrome. I think Mir should be looked at as an independent project now. I might be wrong, of course, but that's the impression I have. https://github.com/MirServer/mir/commits?author=gerboland https://github.com/MirServer/mir/commits?author=gerboland https://launchpad.net/~gerboland https://launchpad.net/~gerboland https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-Now-On-GitHub https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-Now-...
      - wmf 9y ago
        Even given that Mir is independent, it sounds like people are continuing to work on it because they have already invested in working on it. I've yet to hear of any users.
        folknor 9y ago
bwat49 9y ago
"This is where server/compositor/window manager and panels/docks/desktop are all in a single process." This sounds like gnome-shell, and it's atrocious. It's unresponsive and laggy under any sort of load, even the mouse cursor skips around
- c0un7d0wn 9y ago
  https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GnomeShell/GnomeShell4 https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GnomeShell/GnomeS...
  - krastanov 9y ago
    I am not close to the Gnome community, so could somebody aware of the context tell us how serious/realistic/close-term this ideas page is?
    - folknor 9y ago
      It's serious, but it's only a proposal, very a recent (~10 days old) one at that, so there's no code yet. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Shell-4-Proposals https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Sh...
- GuiA 9y ago
  From "Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing": I – Obeys operator The operator shall retain full control of the machine at all times. In particular, the handling of the keyboard, mouse, and other human interface devices must take absolute priority over all other processing. The operator shall have the ability to issue commands and receive immediate confirmation of said commands at all times, regardless of system load. http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284
  - majewsky 9y ago
    Off-topic: It's sad how far away we are from sane personal computing (if I may use these laws as a definition of that term).
pas 9y ago
So X was horrible, because it is very old and blablabla, and Wayland the protocol got finalized without an actual implementation that people use in good old design by committee fashion (no?), and for some reason now everybody writes compositors instead of writing one for Linux in general... I don't really understand why, can someone explain? (I mean, I know about how Mir seemed to be regular Canonical NIH symptom, but why are they continuing with it?)
- wmf 9y ago
  No, Weston is pretty much the reference compositor for Wayland.
  - pas 9y ago
    I tried it. It .. does nothing. Maybe there are/were reference implementations for the protocol extensions too?
    - floatboth 9y ago
      What do you mean by "nothing"? Weston includes a usable desktop shell by default. Without virtual desktops, but with a panel.
      - pas 9y ago
        Case in point, there was no exit. I had to switch linux terminals and kill the process, because even though I was able to launch the terminal (let's say xterm), but I had no idea how to stop the weston session.
        floatboth 9y ago
        Looks like it's Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. I personally never use exit features though, I always switch to the terminal I launched the session from and press Ctrl-C.
- simion314 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
At the very least, get Mir to the point where it's a drop-in replacement for Weston, the reference Wayland compositor. Then make whatever changes you feel like on top of that. If Mir becomes included in DE's across various distros, and if it becomes a runtime option when launching a session (in the same way that GNOME now lets you choose whether to run a Wayland or Xorg session at login), people will be able to A/B test Mir vs Weston, they'll send feedback, and the improvements can be upstreamed. That's all I ask. The backlash against Canonical was in leveraging the Open Source community to make increasingly silo'd services. Canonical is moving in the right direction, first in discontinuing Unity in favor of GNOME, and now in making Mir Wayland-compatible. I hope the trend continues.
- majewsky 9y ago
  I think there's some misunderstanding in your comment about how Wayland works. 99.9% of Wayland desktops out there [1] do not use Weston. Weston is not Wayland's display server, it's a reference implementation of a window manager implementing the Wayland protocol(s). There is no separation between display server and window manager in Wayland, only a single master process, the compositor, which fulfils (roughly) both these roles. So if you're running, say, KDE Plasma, then your compositor is KWin, and Weston is nowhere to be seen. If you're running Sway, then your compositor is Sway. And so on. Wayland is only a protocol, not a piece of software (unless you count the shared libraries provided by the Wayland project). [1] Guesstimate.
eecc 9y ago
:’’( the Linux Desktop tragedy continues... umpteenth reimplementation, failure to address total train wrecks like d-bus and systemd because politics... and the realization that Windows has probably become a more secure environment... and Apple refusing to build decent hardware. Wake me up
- vetinari 9y ago
  Systemd is one of these things that brings many improvements... and gets talked down. If it was at least criticized constructively, but no, it is something else than the "traditional" init, so let's just berate it. And then we wonder, why the Linux desktop is always out of reach, when we dismiss anything, that helps to drag Linux out of the maze of one-off bash and perl scripts.
  - eecc 9y ago
    No. I’m no init fanboy, I’d have just adopted Apple’s launchd and called it a day. No, criticisms of systemd are plenty and well argumented, and yet get systematically talked down. First that comes to mind is the cavalier reaction to leaving some firmware fs mounted rw because systemd used it during reboot; didn’t matter uncautios mishaps could brick a device, team just won’t-fix’d the report and called everyone else an idiot. Doesn’t work like that
    - vetinari 9y ago
      Apple launchd is way more limited, and has much narrower scope (single-seated, single-session desktop). We could talk days about features that systemd provides and launchd doesn't. I've seen only single case of criticism of systemd that was correct and constructive (too bad I didn't bookmark it); I don't count rants that boil down to "it's different than I'm used to", or "it has broken my broken nfs config" as plenty or well argumented. The efi issue was indeed a bug in the devices. If was up to the manufacturer to fix it, not for other software to maintain workarounds indefinitely.
      - eecc 9y ago

57 points by rippsu 9y ago

shmerl 9y ago

So Mir will become a Wayland compositor?

Laaas 9y ago
Yes

snvzz 9y ago

Wayland was already there, and there was nothing wrong with it. OK, maybe there was, but not the bullshit you made up to justify your NiH syndrome alternative. Mir was pointless. Drop it. It should never have existed in the first place.

shmerl 9y ago
If I understand correctly, they'll drop the server part replacing it with Wayland. But they'll keep their compositor, which any Wayland based DE needs to implement anyway. They don't intended it for the desktop, since they are dropping Unity. It's for IoT and etc.
- simion314 9y ago
  They can't replace something with Wayland because Wayland is a protocol and interface, Mir needs to implement code to speak that protocol.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - shmerl 9y ago
    OK, then they are replacing the compositor and changing their client, rewriting it to talk in Wayland protocol.
    - simion314 9y ago
      They are no removing a Mir component and add a Wayland component, they implement the Wayland protocol on top of existing code, maybe refactoring where it is needed, so Mir could talk wayland and still do the Mir stuff that is needed for IoT.
- DC-3 9y ago
  I hardly think that Mutter is the be-all and end-all of Wayland compositor performance. I could see Ubunu plumbing a re-moulded Mir back into their distribution further down the line (while keeping the rest of the GNOME environment). I'm not certain on the technical details, but I believe this should be possibly; for Wayland was certainly designed with compositor agnosticism in mind. Edit: reading further, it appears that GNOME Shell is quite tightly woven into Mutter, which may well complicate matters.
  - simion314 9y ago
    GNOME devs realized already that they have problems with the current architecture, I think X got the blame though this time too, so they plan a GNOME4 version, I do not know if they started coding it or are just in planing phase.
simion314 9y ago
Wayland is a protocol, Mir will use this protocol, I think you are not uptodate with what is happening here.
- wmf 9y ago
  What does Mir offer compared to Weston? It still sounds pretty NIH.
  - simion314 9y ago
    Nobody uses Weston, Weston is like the reference thing, each DE is implementing their own compositor. Some DE like Mate hope they can use Mir and so get an easy way to add Wayland support. Ubuntu uses Gnome now so they use Mutter for wayland, Mir would be use for IoT and other non desktop platforms nd there is the possibility that others DE would use it.
  - folknor 9y ago
    I don't think the guy who posted this works for Canonical at the moment. If he does, his launchpad page is very sparse compared to other employees. I'm not saying that to disparage him in any way, but because it would make it incompatible with a not-invented-here syndrome. I think Mir should be looked at as an independent project now. I might be wrong, of course, but that's the impression I have. https://github.com/MirServer/mir/commits?author=gerboland https://github.com/MirServer/mir/commits?author=gerboland https://launchpad.net/~gerboland https://launchpad.net/~gerboland https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-Now-On-GitHub https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-Now-...
    - wmf 9y ago
      Even given that Mir is independent, it sounds like people are continuing to work on it because they have already invested in working on it. I've yet to hear of any users.
      - folknor 9y ago

bwat49 9y ago

"This is where server/compositor/window manager and panels/docks/desktop are all in a single process." This sounds like gnome-shell, and it's atrocious. It's unresponsive and laggy under any sort of load, even the mouse cursor skips around

c0un7d0wn 9y ago
https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GnomeShell/GnomeShell4 https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/GnomeShell/GnomeS...
- krastanov 9y ago
  I am not close to the Gnome community, so could somebody aware of the context tell us how serious/realistic/close-term this ideas page is?
  - folknor 9y ago
    It's serious, but it's only a proposal, very a recent (~10 days old) one at that, so there's no code yet. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Shell-4-Proposals https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Sh...
GuiA 9y ago
From "Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing": I – Obeys operator The operator shall retain full control of the machine at all times. In particular, the handling of the keyboard, mouse, and other human interface devices must take absolute priority over all other processing. The operator shall have the ability to issue commands and receive immediate confirmation of said commands at all times, regardless of system load. http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=284
- majewsky 9y ago
  Off-topic: It's sad how far away we are from sane personal computing (if I may use these laws as a definition of that term).

pas 9y ago

So X was horrible, because it is very old and blablabla, and Wayland the protocol got finalized without an actual implementation that people use in good old design by committee fashion (no?), and for some reason now everybody writes compositors instead of writing one for Linux in general... I don't really understand why, can someone explain? (I mean, I know about how Mir seemed to be regular Canonical NIH symptom, but why are they continuing with it?)

wmf 9y ago
No, Weston is pretty much the reference compositor for Wayland.
- pas 9y ago
  I tried it. It .. does nothing. Maybe there are/were reference implementations for the protocol extensions too?
  - floatboth 9y ago
    What do you mean by "nothing"? Weston includes a usable desktop shell by default. Without virtual desktops, but with a panel.
    - pas 9y ago
      Case in point, there was no exit. I had to switch linux terminals and kill the process, because even though I was able to launch the terminal (let's say xterm), but I had no idea how to stop the weston session.
      - floatboth 9y ago
        Looks like it's Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. I personally never use exit features though, I always switch to the terminal I launched the session from and press Ctrl-C.
simion314 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

At the very least, get Mir to the point where it's a drop-in replacement for Weston, the reference Wayland compositor. Then make whatever changes you feel like on top of that. If Mir becomes included in DE's across various distros, and if it becomes a runtime option when launching a session (in the same way that GNOME now lets you choose whether to run a Wayland or Xorg session at login), people will be able to A/B test Mir vs Weston, they'll send feedback, and the improvements can be upstreamed. That's all I ask. The backlash against Canonical was in leveraging the Open Source community to make increasingly silo'd services. Canonical is moving in the right direction, first in discontinuing Unity in favor of GNOME, and now in making Mir Wayland-compatible. I hope the trend continues.

majewsky 9y ago
I think there's some misunderstanding in your comment about how Wayland works. 99.9% of Wayland desktops out there [1] do not use Weston. Weston is not Wayland's display server, it's a reference implementation of a window manager implementing the Wayland protocol(s). There is no separation between display server and window manager in Wayland, only a single master process, the compositor, which fulfils (roughly) both these roles. So if you're running, say, KDE Plasma, then your compositor is KWin, and Weston is nowhere to be seen. If you're running Sway, then your compositor is Sway. And so on. Wayland is only a protocol, not a piece of software (unless you count the shared libraries provided by the Wayland project). [1] Guesstimate.

eecc 9y ago

:’’( the Linux Desktop tragedy continues... umpteenth reimplementation, failure to address total train wrecks like d-bus and systemd because politics... and the realization that Windows has probably become a more secure environment... and Apple refusing to build decent hardware. Wake me up

vetinari 9y ago
Systemd is one of these things that brings many improvements... and gets talked down. If it was at least criticized constructively, but no, it is something else than the "traditional" init, so let's just berate it. And then we wonder, why the Linux desktop is always out of reach, when we dismiss anything, that helps to drag Linux out of the maze of one-off bash and perl scripts.
- eecc 9y ago
  No. I’m no init fanboy, I’d have just adopted Apple’s launchd and called it a day. No, criticisms of systemd are plenty and well argumented, and yet get systematically talked down. First that comes to mind is the cavalier reaction to leaving some firmware fs mounted rw because systemd used it during reboot; didn’t matter uncautios mishaps could brick a device, team just won’t-fix’d the report and called everyone else an idiot. Doesn’t work like that
  - vetinari 9y ago
    Apple launchd is way more limited, and has much narrower scope (single-seated, single-session desktop). We could talk days about features that systemd provides and launchd doesn't. I've seen only single case of criticism of systemd that was correct and constructive (too bad I didn't bookmark it); I don't count rants that boil down to "it's different than I'm used to", or "it has broken my broken nfs config" as plenty or well argumented. The efi issue was indeed a bug in the devices. If was up to the manufacturer to fix it, not for other software to maintain workarounds indefinitely.
    - eecc 9y ago