21 ms·

Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

327 points by dz0ny 14y ago

hamax 14y ago
I don't hate this decision. I probably won't upgrade as soon as it comes out, but in my opinion linux ecosystem needs competition in the display server segment. If they screw it up there are plenty distros to choose from.
munchor 14y ago
>This is the worst path Canonical could have possibly chosen. Now developers across all different toolkits and applications, from Gtk+ to Wine, will need to maintain massive patchsets to integrate with Ubuntu. Either that or run in a rootless X window in "legacy" mode. >This will not end well for interoperability, for developers, or for the wider Linux ecosystem. Bad times. That comment on OMG! Ubuntu! is making me uncomfortable with the consequences this might have for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I am not sure about how far I can trust that comment, but the Phoronix article[1] explains it better: >Canonical developers will make to see that applications relying upon Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL, etc will be able to use Mir in an "out of the box" manner. The legacy X support will come from an in-session root-less X Server. I would, though, like to know more about the consequences for this. First of all, we know that Unity will be much faster, since this thing needs to run on phones too and Unity will actually be a "real thing" instead of just a Window Manager (Compiz) plugin. >Isn't a point of FOSS that people can all contribute to one major project instead of reinventing the wheel? That is another comment on OMG! Ubuntu! and I completely agree with it. Sure, freedom of choice is great, but why not use Wayland, really? It was designed from scratch to work for everybody. [1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNzI http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxN...
- zanny 14y ago
  I'm personally not too worried here. The thing is both Wayland and Mir will be able to run X on top of them, so currently all available GUI programs will still work. What matters is the "winner". They will both hit mainstream usage, we will see which one is easier to develop for, and that one will take off. If Mir's claims of fixing input / specialization issues in Wayland comes to fruition, then it will probably win. If Mir hits like Unity, or atrophies like Upstart, then Wayland will probably win. The problem is his Wayland fails everyone can switch to Mir. If Mir proves weaker, we are stuck with a more fragmented desktop space because Canonical doesn't change their minds on these things.
qznc 14y ago
So, Wayland vs Mir will be the next Gnome3 vs Unity?
- insertnickname 14y ago
  Except that people actually support Wayland and everyone is angry at Canonical about Mir.
- deleted 14y ago
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lucian1900 14y ago
Wtf? "We don't like Wayland because of ... reasons, let's build our own stack from scratch!"
- deleted 14y ago
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- rlpb 14y ago
  Why don't you address the specific technical reasons given in TFA?
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    None of those few reasons are particularity compelling and they could be addressed with Wayland just as well.
- cbs 14y ago
  I got the same feeling. They decided to address their decision not to base off of Wayland, but all I read was a convincing reason to fork off of what Wayland is doing. I wish they would have given the real reason for their decision, right now it just smells like NIH.
debian69 14y ago
Ubuntu is like an aneoba they cant stop splitting.
- ihsw 14y ago
  More like a virus.
kunai 14y ago
I suppose it's time to switch to Fedora, now, even though I've been holding out for as long as humanly possible. This just pushes me over the edge.
- chao- 14y ago
  I'm much the opposite: I keep giving Ubuntu a shot, only to find myself disappointed by GNOME, Unity, and the other usual suspects of the DE world. With no need for Unity & Friends, I just use stock Debian or Crunchbang. I'm rooting for Canonical to do well with this so that I might finally be able to switch to using Ubuntu in order to get a well-supported, well-integrated, targeted-by-most, "Fast and Fluid" Desktop Environment. Up until now I still hide away in a corner with my annoying-to-maintain (but certainly "Fast and Fluid") Openbox environment.
  - kunai 14y ago
    I do agree with you on the well-supported and well-integrated part. Ubuntu has the polish and ease of use of OS X with the great hardware support of (nearly) Windows, with the solidity of a steadfast GNU/Linux foundation. But whenever I hear about a new development in the Canonical world, it's always about something that appeases consumers rather than power users (which Ubuntu has been targeted at). For developers who constantly need to dive down into the OS, something like Sabayon or Fedora seems to fit better with their endless modularity. Besides, it would be nice to try a non-Debian distribution for a change.
    - chao- 14y ago
      As a power user, I don't really feel I have particular unfilled needs in any Linux environment. Most of what I need, development-wise, I already have. All that requires is a shell and the ability to configure my apt sources. That said, I don't do much OS-level anything. For that, you will probably always need a distro that assumes less about your graphical environment. What I do miss from other OSes/environments is that sense of a tighter integration. I spent many years not missing it, having originally gotten into GNU/Linux by cobbling together my own crummy environment in Gentoo (on which Sabayon is based). It wasn't really until I first tried Windows 7 a few years back that I realized that if I actually wanted to use the latest this-or-that application in a seamless (dare I say enjoyable?) manner I needed to stop clinging to my obscure WMs. And yet, to this day, I'm actually still clinging.
popee 14y ago
Or just install mint ;-)
- popee 14y ago
  Cmon guys, only -4. You can do better!
- grimborg 14y ago
  I tried Mint with Cinnamon a few months ago. I normally use Gnome classic with XMonad as the window manager. Some things that are in Gnome were missing in Cinnamon (bluetooth settings was an example IIRC, but I don't remember the details), and I ended up with a mess of Gnome and Cinnamon, having some apps installed twice (the Cinnamon version and the Gnome version). Other things required some manual work, like integrating Dropbox with Nemo. I ended up going back to Ubuntu.
aoetr 14y ago
Their arguments against X11 and Wayland seem a bit dubious and vague, and it's also not clear why they are against a modified SurfaceFlinger.
pilgrim689 14y ago
I don't understand all the negative reactions. Canonical is recognizing various problems in making GNU/Linux mainstream. They are then innovating at a deeper level (fixing root causes rather than duct-taping) to ultimately attempt to really attract the layman to a mobile or desktop GNU/Linux distro. Devs don't need to target Mir if they don't want to, Linux users can switch to another Debian if they don't like it, and the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS. Can someone explain to me why this is all so horrible?
- ihsw 14y ago
  You are sacrificing your objectivity, there is no reason other distros cannot be 'just as shiny' as Ubuntu or Mac OS. Furthermore it is horrible because Canonical has a history of secrecy and authoritarianism and they absolutely go against the spirit of open source software development.
  - chc 14y ago
    If the "spirit of open-source software development" can't stand for distro maintainers to have strong control over what goes in their own distros, this open-source spirit sounds pretty authoritarian itself. If (for example) I want to maintain my own window manager for my distro and I provide the source under a free license but don't accept outside contributions into my own distribution, what is wrong with that? Isn't that part of the freedom of free software?
    - zobzu 14y ago
      In my experience distros attempting to keep things as close as possible to packages upstream (except for bug fixes) are always the most useable, stable, etc. So I sort of prefer the "authoritarianism" from upstream. Additionally, an upstream package has authority only on ONE component. The distro has authority on ALL components. That makes ALL the difference.
      - chc 14y ago
        I actually agree. I like Debian better than Ubuntu because I feel like its packages are generally more reliable for my use. But that doesn't mean I would declare Ubuntu to be "horrible" — just not to my taste. I respect Ubuntu's ambition and hope they are successful in what they are trying to accomplish.
sneak 14y ago
> X has a long and successful history and it has served the purposes of both system level and application level UI well for more than 3 decades. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
- dubcanada 14y ago
  I kinda laughed when I read your comment.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
This is awesome! I really can't wait. Having been dealing with the drm/kms stuff to try to build applications "near the metal" on small devices has been painful painful painful. Just too many pots, each with their own sous chef. Someone to put some structure around that and get the GPU folks in line makes so much sense.
caycep 14y ago
The other possibility - I just saw an article on phoronix noting the adoption of the Android window server layer (SurfaceFlinger or something like that) on ubuntu mobile. Not familiar at all with android underpinnings, but would that be another alternative to Mir? i.e. more modern window server, actively developed by Google dollars, etc?
- BruceIV 14y ago
  Current Ubuntu Phone is built on top of SurfaceFlinger, the aim with Mir is to replace it.
- zanny 14y ago
  SurfaceFlinger is missing a lot of essential desktop display protocol components, like native windowing, chrome allocation, it only uses openGL ES, and isn't environment agnostic at all. Also, completely opinionated, but after reading some of the SF code in the AOSP, it seems like just as much of a mess as X is implementation wise. It is all over the place.
caycep 14y ago
Also - kind of a noob question but: my assumption is all the recent ubuntu controversy is over ubuntu desktop. Does this affect the ubuntu server distro at all? Especially since I am trying to learn how to create a well provisioned ubuntu server vm for use with linode deployments...
- signed0 14y ago
  It shouldn't, Ubuntu Server doesn't currently include X.
BruceIV 14y ago
On the one hand, this looks like one good way to get rid of the massive bag of hurt that is X; on the other, seriously Canonical? Re-inventing another huge chunk of the stack just because? NIH syndrome much?
- crististm 14y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but what is wrong with X, anyway?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    It draws process boundaries in the wrong place then forces enormous complexity trying to deal with the resulting synchronization problems. To be fair, when X was designed, I doubt it ever occurred to anyone that one day you'd have opaque resize, much less a fully double-buffered dance between application, X server, and window manager.
  - iso-8859-1 14y ago
    http://askubuntu.com/a/11877/19466 http://askubuntu.com/a/11877/19466 : X has two drawing APIs. One of these is a part of the core X11 protocol, which is ancient, useless, and nobody uses. The other is the XRender extension which provides modern composite operations, among other things such as gradients. This is what Cairo, for example, uses. X also has font drawing APIs. http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on-the-X-protocol http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on... : The X11 protocol (without extensions) defines about 120 types of requests: create a window, move a window, etc. Nowadays, there's at least 25 % of them which are useless: usage of server-side font, or the drawing of squares and polygon, are unused by any modern application or toolkit. All of this is superseded by requests from extensions, like the XRender one. The handling of multiple monitors displays has totally been screwed up. X11 has been designed to work in Zaphod mode (independent monitors). But Xinerama, and nowadays XRandR have replaced it up: recent X servers (released after ~2007) does not support Zaphod mode anymore, even if it's a core piece of the X11 protocol.
  - deleted 14y ago
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acabal 14y ago
Maybe this is a good idea, I don't know about X/Wayland enough to say. But it worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings. It's also less knowledge to have to keep in your head for system administration stuff. (Which is still necessary in Ubuntu, regardless of what the "it just works for me" people say.) Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is standing alone with Compiz, Unity, Upstart, Launchpad, and Mir, all pretty fundamental pieces of the core system. In a decade, will switching from Ubuntu to Debian be as big of a culture shock as switching from Windows to Linux?
- kunai 14y ago
  > What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc. all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly more open OS X, which isn't good at all.
  - hmo09 14y ago
    Apple already have more developers contributing to useful upstream code than Canonical (Webkit, cups, LLVM).
    - HerraBRE 14y ago
      Placating the tech crowd by giving away fragments of low level code is really just marketing and a way to retain talent that would otherwise refuse to work for them. It's not as if their users can actually use any of that stuff to change how their macs work (without switching to a different OS or browser).
      - deleted 14y ago
AnthonBerg 14y ago
Given my bad experience during the past years of Ubuntu breaking things in Debian and inventing poor software by themselves, my estimation is that they're not smart enough to pull this off.
- hollerith 14y ago
  am curious how Ubuntu broke things in Debian. were Debian maintainers too ready to accept changes from Ubuntu?
  - AnthonBerg 14y ago
    Ah! Oops! I meant break things FROM debian, as in got code from Debian and broke it in Ubuntu, or didn't pull fixes from Debian into Ubuntu for years. My apologies! I'm not a native English speaker :( and sometimes I think I am smarter than I am :)
    - TheCowboy 14y ago
      What did they break?
      - AnthonBerg 14y ago
        mdadm and associated init scripts was the dealbreaker for me they broke the initscripts so array assembly didn't work correctly - not even the same as the installed man page stated they had mdadm version 2.x (has significant flaws) for YEARS after mdadm 3.x was accepted into debian - YEARS - even after multiple users making clear what the problem was in bug reports a user even made a patch and a ppa which fixed things but still they didn't pick up on that for a year + as i recall and they broke/removed debian's PERFECT support for installation onto md raid other stuff i've honestly forgotten but i swear there was more oh! oh! wait, also the STOPPING THE BOOT PROCESS TO WAIT FOR YOU TO PRESS A KEY if a drive needed an fsck!!!!! what the f.... (don't understand why you were downvoted, good question)
        deleted 14y ago
tiles 14y ago
From the MirSpec at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec: "Why Not Wayland / Weston? An obvious clarification first: Wayland is a protocol definition that defines how a client application should talk to a compositor component. It touches areas like surface creation/destruction, graphics buffer allocation/management, input event handling and a rough prototype for the integration of shell components. However, our evaluation of the protocol definition revealed that the Wayland protocol suffers from multiple problems, including: The input event handling partly recreates the X semantics and is thus likely to expose similar problems to the ones we described in the introductory section. The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged from our perspective and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the protocol. However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but it didn't fit our requirements and we decided to go for the following architecture w.r.t. to protocol-integration: * A protocol-agnostic inner core that is extremely well-defined, well-tested and portable. * An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols. In summary, we have not chosen Wayland/Weston as our basis for delivering a next-generation user experience as it does not fulfill our requirements completely. More to this, with our protocol- and platform-agnostic approach, we can make sure that we reach our goal of a consistent and beautiful user experience across platforms and device form factors. However, Wayland support could be added either by providing a Wayland-specific frontend implementation for our display server or by providing a client-side implementation of libwayland that ultimately talks to Mir."
- deleted 14y ago
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hazov 14y ago
For those that are curious this is a good diagram by Alison Chaiken about the two major ways of the architecture of Linux graphics: http://she-devel.com/Linux_Android_Graphics_Stacks.svg http://she-devel.com/Linux_Android_Graphics_Stacks.svg I believe Mir will just be a custom tailored SurfaceFlinger, I just do not understand why Canonical will not use SurfaceFlinger. EDIT: Maybe because SurfaceFlinger is built with OpenGLES in mind? I don't really know.
- sandGorgon 14y ago
  I have this question as well. Especially since they have already done so much work around Android for Ubuntu touch, why not simply build, what will essentially be desktop Android with a Unity Shell.
mixedbit 14y ago
It it going to be compatible with existing window managers for X or does the change mean that Ubuntu will work only with Gnome or window managers developed from scratch for Mir?
otterley 14y ago
I notice that rasterization to non-display devices (e.g. printers) isn't mentioned in the proposal at all. This was a serious weakness of X11 and I'm surprised it's not discussed. In mainstream consumer OSes, such capability is part of the basic graphics toolkits (GDI, Carbon). If Canonical is serious about attracting mainstream Linux adoption, this is going to have to be addressed from the start.
csense 14y ago
What does this mean for Ubuntu-based distributions that offer a more traditional look and feel, like Linux Mint? I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu shoved Unity down everyone's throats. I like the balance Ubuntu strikes between good hardware support, recent packages, proprietary graphics support, and the "it just works" factor. I just want all of that without the Unity mess. Unity might be good on a cell phone, but it was really crashy and impossible to do any work, because every time I've attempted to use Unity, I couldn't figure out how to do the simplest things with the GUI, and ended up switching within days. It sounds like the new window manager will only support Unity.
JoachimSchipper 14y ago
Relevant: https://lwn.net/Articles/524606/ https://lwn.net/Articles/524606/, OpenBSD complaining about modern X becoming less and less portable. Ubuntu, of course, is always willing to turn the incompatibility to 11.
ac 14y ago
Does it mean we won't be able to use "ssh -X" on Ubuntu in future?
- zanny 14y ago
  You can't ssh -X on Wayland, either. If it is running an X server on top (and Mir says it will, and Wayland can) you can probably still do ssh -X.
- 65a 14y ago
  Ubuntu is not really a go-to system for advanced users...
desireco42 14y ago
While I agree with most of you who says they are worried by this development, I understand and welcome this direction Ubuntu is taking, almost making their own, not flavor but unique OS. Which is what people said HP should have done. It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows. If Ubuntu manage to pull this off, and I think they deserve all our support in that, we will get inspiration for all the open source projects as well as good codebase they can fork and work with. I am not expert in licencing, but anything they accomplish can't be bad for the open source movement. My 2c.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows." What do you find wrong with Firefox on Ubuntu exactly? I'm not challenging just interested. I use Win7/IE9 and Ubuntu1204/Firefox 19 most days.
  - desireco42 14y ago
    Pages are loading more slowly, you can notice lagging of some actions. As a developer I am used to going fast through things, so when things are slow, it is noticable. Maybe it is due to pluggins, I don't know, I just know it is surprisingly slower. Under every other circumstance, I would prefer linux/ubuntu to any other machine. I was using linux for several years as primary dev machine. At the moment I am on a mac, even though I have both linux and win machines as well.
elteto 14y ago
Wow. The sheer level of FUD and negativity that you can find on these comments is just mind blowing. It seems that most of it (with a few knowledgeable exceptions) is coming from folks who don't know what they are talking about and have never probably developed graphical applications for Linux. They can't elaborate a single technical reason as to why they dislike whatever it is they dislike, yet they still jump on the bashing theme du jour (which nowadays seems to be Canonical).
- asveikau 14y ago
  Your description sounds a lot like the bashing of X itself. As someone who is happy with an X desktop I don't entirely get it. I understand that some of the folks doing Wayland have experience hacking on X but it seems a lot like wheel reinvention. X may have some warts but it's hard to argue that it's totally broken; it's also come a long way in the last 10 years or so, I'd say in testament to its ability to be extended. I think innovation in the toolkits (to catch up with where X is today) sounds like a better deal.
mtgx 14y ago
It seems they are rewriting Unity, which I think is great. Unity is too slow. It should never be used for mobile devices as it is. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec
- zanny 14y ago
  What I don't get is why Canonical doesn't just implement Unity as a Kwin frontend if they are rewriting it. They obviously know Compiz has no support anymore, and if they are switching the bulk of their projects to qt, it seems like they have a compositor just kind of sitting there waiting to be adopted.
prodigal_erik 14y ago
Remoting over a network with latency is not even an afterthought; none of those words appear in this spec at all. I'm worried that a new display system might start getting traction in the industry while assuming there's only one computer in the world I care about and that I'm sitting in front of it, because that would be a huge step backwards.
- chmike 14y ago
  This exactly what worried me after reading this anoucement. If there is no remote display capability, it will be a regression.
  - cdmckay 14y ago
    Why would it be a regression?
doublextremevil 14y ago
from Wayland creator Kristian Høgsberg: " things they claim wayland/weston input can't be extended to support: "... adjusting and extending X's input model is difficult and supporting features like input event batching and compression, motion event prediction together with associated power-saving strategies or flexible synchronization schemes for aligning input event delivery and rendering operations is (too) complex." is already implemented and working in weston today..." https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts
gvalkov 14y ago
Just wanted to mention that the news of Mir has hit wayland's mailing list[1]. I'm very curious to see what the wayland developers think of all this. A lot of work has already went into wayland and in making things work with it (gtk3, qt5, clutter etc). This is truly an ambitious project and I doubt that ubuntu engineers would needlessly want to write all of this from scratch if there weren't legitimate shortcomings in wayland's architecture. Personally, I'm looking forward to my wayland powered, fedora 20 desktop running the yet to be invented WMonad tiling window compositor. [1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-March/007770.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...
binarycrusader 14y ago
If this is going to have any real hope of replacing X it also needs to be licensed as liberally as X is, otherwise, it's doomed in many commercial sectors. (Current mir license appears to be GPLv3.)
scolex 14y ago
in the past when ubuntu was still "linux for human beings" they did great job polishing the linux and providing good linux experience. They were very good improvers. but then they decided to became inventors. But they don't have strong engineering background and their products were trash. upstart never provided advanced parallelism and was surpassed by systemd Top menu and indicators rely on d-bus -- really stupid idea and misuse of technology they abandon mutter+clutter for closed gl-canvas rendering library + compiz to be used in unity. Now is mutter+clutter far more advanced. Now they want to change wayland for mir? are they serious? They are not good at inventing things. They will just make linux fragmentation much worst. It's really problematic to make good drivers and gpu companies can't spend money and people on different linux platforms. ubuntu became from "linux for human beings" to "crappy mac-os like for poor"
mhw 14y ago
More interesting stuff from one of the developers here: http://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-as-a-new-home/ http://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envis...
yk 14y ago
It appears that any sufficiently widely adopted Unix becomes a OS of its own. Examples include OSX, Android and increasingly Ubuntu. ( I have a wonderful proof for this, unfortunately HN does not allow to write into the margins.)
VLM 14y ago
No one has made the obvious comparison in the comments to ipv4 vs ipv6? The main issue with "yet another graphics protocol" is islanding. Right now all my "linux" boxes are more or less intercompatible. I can ssh -X whatever mythtv-setup and get the config GUI from a server that doesn't even have a monitor (not even sure if it has a graphics card?) Now I / we will inevitably have three little not too compatible islands of X, wayland, mir, who knows. My primary interest as an end user, because the machines "I do stuff on" are multiple huge headless servers and virtual images running on them, is network transparency. As long as a Mir keyboard/mouse/monitor can connect to a "real" system and give my my X when necessary, in a VNC like window or whatever if necessary, I'll be OK. Connectivity demands go both ways. If my refrigerator ends up running Ubuntu for its user interface, I'd really like to be able to remotely connect to it to mess with it.
- stephen_g 14y ago
  What comparison to IPv4 vs IPv6? There are very few parallels... I guess you could say that X and Wayland are like IPv4 and IPv6, where we strive for total migration to the new, better protocol, but in the meantime you can have a dual-stack setup with both that works fine. But it's not like anyone is coming in with a competitor to IPv6, so the analogy completely breaks down...
dakimov 14y ago
The worst thing is using C++ for a GUI engine. Don't do that mistake again! The code looks quite weak at the first glance, but at least not so ugly as average open-source code. The architecture solutions seem a bit weak too, even weaker than a GUI engine I have written being a junior developer. Overall, their code seems to be written by a junior developer. Seems to be too ambitious so far. The problem is that it is actually really hard to make a proper GUI engine. It requires enormous experience and amount of expertise, like you can come up with something decent after building a few your own engines and closely analyzing existing solutions.
Someone 14y ago
Anybody know what this will be licensed under? I would think (L)GPL, but https://launchpad.net/mir https://launchpad.net/mir isn't clear: "Licences: GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source (Boost Software License - Version 1.0) Commercial subscription expires 2022-09-24 This project’s licence has not been reviewed."
- mzs 14y ago
  COPYING indicates gpl3, main.cpp does as well, and so does the readme.
trotsky 14y ago
Did I read that correctly, there is no plan to build GTK+ bindings - they are going to qt based dekstop applications? Or do they expect gnome to port to mir? Unless they already worked that out it doesn't seem too likely as this amounts to a direct shot at them. If Ubuntu is suddenly not going to have any gtk applications available it is going to be a very foreign environment to lots of its current users.
- unwind 14y ago
  Not sure, they do say: Application authors relying on Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL etc. should not be required to perform additional porting as we will work on providing Mir integration for the most prominent toolkit choices. Maybe they've just decided to take Qt first, and that's why there's already a project for this. I'm a bit confused, I thought GTK+ did its rendering through Cairo, which would mean that a Cairo backend is what's needed. Not 100% sure about this though, I don't track GTK+ at a low level these days.
X4 14y ago
######### We need Borg efficiency!! SAR - We need fast driver development using safe and automatic "Template-Based" build systems. There is a lot GNU/Linux can learn from Embedded Systems development.
st3fan 14y ago
"Tailored towards an EGL/GL(ES) world" - this is obviously to make it easier for Canonical to run on (mobile) devices.
vsync 14y ago
> "beautiful"... "beautiful"... "beautiful". Really?
deleted 14y ago
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morsch 14y ago
They also announced the successor to Unity will be based on Qt/QML... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5320633 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5320633
ElliotH 14y ago
Competition is good. Ubuntu seems to have their reasons not to want to use Wayland. Maybe Mir is awesome. Then I can move to it. If it's not so awesome then like Unity and Upstart I can ignore it. Seems to me the enemy here is the old fashioned clunky X server. Good. Two armies fighting the same target at least eliminates that target before they start fighting each other. Besides, if they both end up having support in all the major toolkits and they both have an X server fallback, then we should be able to meet in the middle somewhere eventually.
teeja 14y ago
Considering that Plasma (on my install) uses 100MB of RAM to work its wonders (I have no idea what or how), that alone makes me suspect there might be a better way.
lsiebert 14y ago
Either it will be better, worse, or a mixed bag. If it's better, Then they have improved the ecosystem, and the developers and users will follow. If it's worse, then we can hope they will switch back, or they will lose users/developers. The concern is a mixed bag... splitting development on something that may or may not ultimately win. But mixed bags lead to innovation more than having one true way. Ideas from Mir and Wayland and X can lead to all three of them improving more then if only one or two of them were viable. However the lack of focus may slow individual development. TL/DR Worst case is still not horrible, so long as Canonical recognizes it.
sandGorgon 14y ago
This is Ubuntu's "Bada" move - it is scared of being assimilated by Android that it is forgetting that it can truly innovate in the UX and not by building walled gardens around display managers. Ubuntu already has significant investment in Surfaceflinger/Android via its Touch vertical. It has also started migrating to QT/QML for its shell (which work really well on Android). There is a significant opportunity to innovate on UX (like Blackberry Z10), rather than throw away the ecosystem that would come with adopting an Android core. Yesterday, I couldnt join a GoToMeeting using Ubuntu. But just after, I did it in less than 2 minutes by using an app oumy Android device. That is a huge ecosystem, that I want to use on my desktop (I dont know how the desktop UX for a touch app will work, but I hope it will). I say that Ubuntu, Google and Valve should sit together and come up with a graphics+sound backend that will work together. And let me play Half Life 3 on my phone and desktop simultaneously !
lee 14y ago
Those who are complaining that Ubuntu is diverging from most other Linux distros forget that this is the nature of open source software and competition. Part of the success of open source software is that it's highly evolutionary. Good successful projects attract a following and get better. For this to happen, you have to have choice and diversity. There has to be competing flavors, libraries, and distros all vying for market share. What Ubuntu is doing is great for us all. Providing more alternatives in the Linux ecosystem than just relying on X/Wayland/Whatever.

327 points by dz0ny 14y ago

hamax 14y ago

I don't hate this decision. I probably won't upgrade as soon as it comes out, but in my opinion linux ecosystem needs competition in the display server segment. If they screw it up there are plenty distros to choose from.

munchor 14y ago

>This is the worst path Canonical could have possibly chosen. Now developers across all different toolkits and applications, from Gtk+ to Wine, will need to maintain massive patchsets to integrate with Ubuntu. Either that or run in a rootless X window in "legacy" mode. >This will not end well for interoperability, for developers, or for the wider Linux ecosystem. Bad times. That comment on OMG! Ubuntu! is making me uncomfortable with the consequences this might have for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I am not sure about how far I can trust that comment, but the Phoronix article[1] explains it better: >Canonical developers will make to see that applications relying upon Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL, etc will be able to use Mir in an "out of the box" manner. The legacy X support will come from an in-session root-less X Server. I would, though, like to know more about the consequences for this. First of all, we know that Unity will be much faster, since this thing needs to run on phones too and Unity will actually be a "real thing" instead of just a Window Manager (Compiz) plugin. >Isn't a point of FOSS that people can all contribute to one major project instead of reinventing the wheel? That is another comment on OMG! Ubuntu! and I completely agree with it. Sure, freedom of choice is great, but why not use Wayland, really? It was designed from scratch to work for everybody. [1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNzI http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxN...

zanny 14y ago
I'm personally not too worried here. The thing is both Wayland and Mir will be able to run X on top of them, so currently all available GUI programs will still work. What matters is the "winner". They will both hit mainstream usage, we will see which one is easier to develop for, and that one will take off. If Mir's claims of fixing input / specialization issues in Wayland comes to fruition, then it will probably win. If Mir hits like Unity, or atrophies like Upstart, then Wayland will probably win. The problem is his Wayland fails everyone can switch to Mir. If Mir proves weaker, we are stuck with a more fragmented desktop space because Canonical doesn't change their minds on these things.

qznc 14y ago

So, Wayland vs Mir will be the next Gnome3 vs Unity?

insertnickname 14y ago
Except that people actually support Wayland and everyone is angry at Canonical about Mir.
deleted 14y ago
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lucian1900 14y ago

Wtf? "We don't like Wayland because of ... reasons, let's build our own stack from scratch!"

deleted 14y ago
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rlpb 14y ago
Why don't you address the specific technical reasons given in TFA?
- lucian1900 14y ago
  None of those few reasons are particularity compelling and they could be addressed with Wayland just as well.
cbs 14y ago
I got the same feeling. They decided to address their decision not to base off of Wayland, but all I read was a convincing reason to fork off of what Wayland is doing. I wish they would have given the real reason for their decision, right now it just smells like NIH.

debian69 14y ago

Ubuntu is like an aneoba they cant stop splitting.

ihsw 14y ago
More like a virus.

kunai 14y ago

I suppose it's time to switch to Fedora, now, even though I've been holding out for as long as humanly possible. This just pushes me over the edge.

chao- 14y ago
I'm much the opposite: I keep giving Ubuntu a shot, only to find myself disappointed by GNOME, Unity, and the other usual suspects of the DE world. With no need for Unity & Friends, I just use stock Debian or Crunchbang. I'm rooting for Canonical to do well with this so that I might finally be able to switch to using Ubuntu in order to get a well-supported, well-integrated, targeted-by-most, "Fast and Fluid" Desktop Environment. Up until now I still hide away in a corner with my annoying-to-maintain (but certainly "Fast and Fluid") Openbox environment.
- kunai 14y ago
  I do agree with you on the well-supported and well-integrated part. Ubuntu has the polish and ease of use of OS X with the great hardware support of (nearly) Windows, with the solidity of a steadfast GNU/Linux foundation. But whenever I hear about a new development in the Canonical world, it's always about something that appeases consumers rather than power users (which Ubuntu has been targeted at). For developers who constantly need to dive down into the OS, something like Sabayon or Fedora seems to fit better with their endless modularity. Besides, it would be nice to try a non-Debian distribution for a change.
  - chao- 14y ago
    As a power user, I don't really feel I have particular unfilled needs in any Linux environment. Most of what I need, development-wise, I already have. All that requires is a shell and the ability to configure my apt sources. That said, I don't do much OS-level anything. For that, you will probably always need a distro that assumes less about your graphical environment. What I do miss from other OSes/environments is that sense of a tighter integration. I spent many years not missing it, having originally gotten into GNU/Linux by cobbling together my own crummy environment in Gentoo (on which Sabayon is based). It wasn't really until I first tried Windows 7 a few years back that I realized that if I actually wanted to use the latest this-or-that application in a seamless (dare I say enjoyable?) manner I needed to stop clinging to my obscure WMs. And yet, to this day, I'm actually still clinging.

popee 14y ago

Or just install mint ;-)

popee 14y ago
Cmon guys, only -4. You can do better!
grimborg 14y ago
I tried Mint with Cinnamon a few months ago. I normally use Gnome classic with XMonad as the window manager. Some things that are in Gnome were missing in Cinnamon (bluetooth settings was an example IIRC, but I don't remember the details), and I ended up with a mess of Gnome and Cinnamon, having some apps installed twice (the Cinnamon version and the Gnome version). Other things required some manual work, like integrating Dropbox with Nemo. I ended up going back to Ubuntu.

aoetr 14y ago

Their arguments against X11 and Wayland seem a bit dubious and vague, and it's also not clear why they are against a modified SurfaceFlinger.

pilgrim689 14y ago

I don't understand all the negative reactions. Canonical is recognizing various problems in making GNU/Linux mainstream. They are then innovating at a deeper level (fixing root causes rather than duct-taping) to ultimately attempt to really attract the layman to a mobile or desktop GNU/Linux distro. Devs don't need to target Mir if they don't want to, Linux users can switch to another Debian if they don't like it, and the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS. Can someone explain to me why this is all so horrible?

ihsw 14y ago
You are sacrificing your objectivity, there is no reason other distros cannot be 'just as shiny' as Ubuntu or Mac OS. Furthermore it is horrible because Canonical has a history of secrecy and authoritarianism and they absolutely go against the spirit of open source software development.
- chc 14y ago
  If the "spirit of open-source software development" can't stand for distro maintainers to have strong control over what goes in their own distros, this open-source spirit sounds pretty authoritarian itself. If (for example) I want to maintain my own window manager for my distro and I provide the source under a free license but don't accept outside contributions into my own distribution, what is wrong with that? Isn't that part of the freedom of free software?
  - zobzu 14y ago
    In my experience distros attempting to keep things as close as possible to packages upstream (except for bug fixes) are always the most useable, stable, etc. So I sort of prefer the "authoritarianism" from upstream. Additionally, an upstream package has authority only on ONE component. The distro has authority on ALL components. That makes ALL the difference.
    - chc 14y ago
      I actually agree. I like Debian better than Ubuntu because I feel like its packages are generally more reliable for my use. But that doesn't mean I would declare Ubuntu to be "horrible" — just not to my taste. I respect Ubuntu's ambition and hope they are successful in what they are trying to accomplish.

sneak 14y ago

> X has a long and successful history and it has served the purposes of both system level and application level UI well for more than 3 decades. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

dubcanada 14y ago
I kinda laughed when I read your comment.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

This is awesome! I really can't wait. Having been dealing with the drm/kms stuff to try to build applications "near the metal" on small devices has been painful painful painful. Just too many pots, each with their own sous chef. Someone to put some structure around that and get the GPU folks in line makes so much sense.

caycep 14y ago

The other possibility - I just saw an article on phoronix noting the adoption of the Android window server layer (SurfaceFlinger or something like that) on ubuntu mobile. Not familiar at all with android underpinnings, but would that be another alternative to Mir? i.e. more modern window server, actively developed by Google dollars, etc?

BruceIV 14y ago
Current Ubuntu Phone is built on top of SurfaceFlinger, the aim with Mir is to replace it.
zanny 14y ago
SurfaceFlinger is missing a lot of essential desktop display protocol components, like native windowing, chrome allocation, it only uses openGL ES, and isn't environment agnostic at all. Also, completely opinionated, but after reading some of the SF code in the AOSP, it seems like just as much of a mess as X is implementation wise. It is all over the place.

caycep 14y ago

Also - kind of a noob question but: my assumption is all the recent ubuntu controversy is over ubuntu desktop. Does this affect the ubuntu server distro at all? Especially since I am trying to learn how to create a well provisioned ubuntu server vm for use with linode deployments...

signed0 14y ago
It shouldn't, Ubuntu Server doesn't currently include X.

BruceIV 14y ago

On the one hand, this looks like one good way to get rid of the massive bag of hurt that is X; on the other, seriously Canonical? Re-inventing another huge chunk of the stack just because? NIH syndrome much?

crististm 14y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but what is wrong with X, anyway?
- rayiner 14y ago
  It draws process boundaries in the wrong place then forces enormous complexity trying to deal with the resulting synchronization problems. To be fair, when X was designed, I doubt it ever occurred to anyone that one day you'd have opaque resize, much less a fully double-buffered dance between application, X server, and window manager.
- iso-8859-1 14y ago
  http://askubuntu.com/a/11877/19466 http://askubuntu.com/a/11877/19466 : X has two drawing APIs. One of these is a part of the core X11 protocol, which is ancient, useless, and nobody uses. The other is the XRender extension which provides modern composite operations, among other things such as gradients. This is what Cairo, for example, uses. X also has font drawing APIs. http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on-the-X-protocol http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on... : The X11 protocol (without extensions) defines about 120 types of requests: create a window, move a window, etc. Nowadays, there's at least 25 % of them which are useless: usage of server-side font, or the drawing of squares and polygon, are unused by any modern application or toolkit. All of this is superseded by requests from extensions, like the XRender one. The handling of multiple monitors displays has totally been screwed up. X11 has been designed to work in Zaphod mode (independent monitors). But Xinerama, and nowadays XRandR have replaced it up: recent X servers (released after ~2007) does not support Zaphod mode anymore, even if it's a core piece of the X11 protocol.
- deleted 14y ago
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acabal 14y ago

Maybe this is a good idea, I don't know about X/Wayland enough to say. But it worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings. It's also less knowledge to have to keep in your head for system administration stuff. (Which is still necessary in Ubuntu, regardless of what the "it just works for me" people say.) Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is standing alone with Compiz, Unity, Upstart, Launchpad, and Mir, all pretty fundamental pieces of the core system. In a decade, will switching from Ubuntu to Debian be as big of a culture shock as switching from Windows to Linux?

kunai 14y ago
> What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc. all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly more open OS X, which isn't good at all.
- hmo09 14y ago
  Apple already have more developers contributing to useful upstream code than Canonical (Webkit, cups, LLVM).
  - HerraBRE 14y ago
    Placating the tech crowd by giving away fragments of low level code is really just marketing and a way to retain talent that would otherwise refuse to work for them. It's not as if their users can actually use any of that stuff to change how their macs work (without switching to a different OS or browser).
    - deleted 14y ago

AnthonBerg 14y ago

Given my bad experience during the past years of Ubuntu breaking things in Debian and inventing poor software by themselves, my estimation is that they're not smart enough to pull this off.

hollerith 14y ago
am curious how Ubuntu broke things in Debian. were Debian maintainers too ready to accept changes from Ubuntu?
- AnthonBerg 14y ago
  Ah! Oops! I meant break things FROM debian, as in got code from Debian and broke it in Ubuntu, or didn't pull fixes from Debian into Ubuntu for years. My apologies! I'm not a native English speaker :( and sometimes I think I am smarter than I am :)
  - TheCowboy 14y ago
    What did they break?
    - AnthonBerg 14y ago
      mdadm and associated init scripts was the dealbreaker for me they broke the initscripts so array assembly didn't work correctly - not even the same as the installed man page stated they had mdadm version 2.x (has significant flaws) for YEARS after mdadm 3.x was accepted into debian - YEARS - even after multiple users making clear what the problem was in bug reports a user even made a patch and a ppa which fixed things but still they didn't pick up on that for a year + as i recall and they broke/removed debian's PERFECT support for installation onto md raid other stuff i've honestly forgotten but i swear there was more oh! oh! wait, also the STOPPING THE BOOT PROCESS TO WAIT FOR YOU TO PRESS A KEY if a drive needed an fsck!!!!! what the f.... (don't understand why you were downvoted, good question)
      - deleted 14y ago

tiles 14y ago

From the MirSpec at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec: "Why Not Wayland / Weston? An obvious clarification first: Wayland is a protocol definition that defines how a client application should talk to a compositor component. It touches areas like surface creation/destruction, graphics buffer allocation/management, input event handling and a rough prototype for the integration of shell components. However, our evaluation of the protocol definition revealed that the Wayland protocol suffers from multiple problems, including: The input event handling partly recreates the X semantics and is thus likely to expose similar problems to the ones we described in the introductory section. The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged from our perspective and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the protocol. However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but it didn't fit our requirements and we decided to go for the following architecture w.r.t. to protocol-integration: * A protocol-agnostic inner core that is extremely well-defined, well-tested and portable. * An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols. In summary, we have not chosen Wayland/Weston as our basis for delivering a next-generation user experience as it does not fulfill our requirements completely. More to this, with our protocol- and platform-agnostic approach, we can make sure that we reach our goal of a consistent and beautiful user experience across platforms and device form factors. However, Wayland support could be added either by providing a Wayland-specific frontend implementation for our display server or by providing a client-side implementation of libwayland that ultimately talks to Mir."

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hazov 14y ago

For those that are curious this is a good diagram by Alison Chaiken about the two major ways of the architecture of Linux graphics: http://she-devel.com/Linux_Android_Graphics_Stacks.svg http://she-devel.com/Linux_Android_Graphics_Stacks.svg I believe Mir will just be a custom tailored SurfaceFlinger, I just do not understand why Canonical will not use SurfaceFlinger. EDIT: Maybe because SurfaceFlinger is built with OpenGLES in mind? I don't really know.

sandGorgon 14y ago
I have this question as well. Especially since they have already done so much work around Android for Ubuntu touch, why not simply build, what will essentially be desktop Android with a Unity Shell.

mixedbit 14y ago

It it going to be compatible with existing window managers for X or does the change mean that Ubuntu will work only with Gnome or window managers developed from scratch for Mir?

otterley 14y ago

I notice that rasterization to non-display devices (e.g. printers) isn't mentioned in the proposal at all. This was a serious weakness of X11 and I'm surprised it's not discussed. In mainstream consumer OSes, such capability is part of the basic graphics toolkits (GDI, Carbon). If Canonical is serious about attracting mainstream Linux adoption, this is going to have to be addressed from the start.

csense 14y ago

What does this mean for Ubuntu-based distributions that offer a more traditional look and feel, like Linux Mint? I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu shoved Unity down everyone's throats. I like the balance Ubuntu strikes between good hardware support, recent packages, proprietary graphics support, and the "it just works" factor. I just want all of that without the Unity mess. Unity might be good on a cell phone, but it was really crashy and impossible to do any work, because every time I've attempted to use Unity, I couldn't figure out how to do the simplest things with the GUI, and ended up switching within days. It sounds like the new window manager will only support Unity.

JoachimSchipper 14y ago

Relevant: https://lwn.net/Articles/524606/ https://lwn.net/Articles/524606/, OpenBSD complaining about modern X becoming less and less portable. Ubuntu, of course, is always willing to turn the incompatibility to 11.

ac 14y ago

Does it mean we won't be able to use "ssh -X" on Ubuntu in future?

zanny 14y ago
You can't ssh -X on Wayland, either. If it is running an X server on top (and Mir says it will, and Wayland can) you can probably still do ssh -X.
65a 14y ago
Ubuntu is not really a go-to system for advanced users...

desireco42 14y ago

While I agree with most of you who says they are worried by this development, I understand and welcome this direction Ubuntu is taking, almost making their own, not flavor but unique OS. Which is what people said HP should have done. It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows. If Ubuntu manage to pull this off, and I think they deserve all our support in that, we will get inspiration for all the open source projects as well as good codebase they can fork and work with. I am not expert in licencing, but anything they accomplish can't be bad for the open source movement. My 2c.

keithpeter 14y ago
"It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows." What do you find wrong with Firefox on Ubuntu exactly? I'm not challenging just interested. I use Win7/IE9 and Ubuntu1204/Firefox 19 most days.
- desireco42 14y ago
  Pages are loading more slowly, you can notice lagging of some actions. As a developer I am used to going fast through things, so when things are slow, it is noticable. Maybe it is due to pluggins, I don't know, I just know it is surprisingly slower. Under every other circumstance, I would prefer linux/ubuntu to any other machine. I was using linux for several years as primary dev machine. At the moment I am on a mac, even though I have both linux and win machines as well.

elteto 14y ago

Wow. The sheer level of FUD and negativity that you can find on these comments is just mind blowing. It seems that most of it (with a few knowledgeable exceptions) is coming from folks who don't know what they are talking about and have never probably developed graphical applications for Linux. They can't elaborate a single technical reason as to why they dislike whatever it is they dislike, yet they still jump on the bashing theme du jour (which nowadays seems to be Canonical).

asveikau 14y ago
Your description sounds a lot like the bashing of X itself. As someone who is happy with an X desktop I don't entirely get it. I understand that some of the folks doing Wayland have experience hacking on X but it seems a lot like wheel reinvention. X may have some warts but it's hard to argue that it's totally broken; it's also come a long way in the last 10 years or so, I'd say in testament to its ability to be extended. I think innovation in the toolkits (to catch up with where X is today) sounds like a better deal.

mtgx 14y ago

It seems they are rewriting Unity, which I think is great. Unity is too slow. It should never be used for mobile devices as it is. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec

zanny 14y ago
What I don't get is why Canonical doesn't just implement Unity as a Kwin frontend if they are rewriting it. They obviously know Compiz has no support anymore, and if they are switching the bulk of their projects to qt, it seems like they have a compositor just kind of sitting there waiting to be adopted.

prodigal_erik 14y ago

Remoting over a network with latency is not even an afterthought; none of those words appear in this spec at all. I'm worried that a new display system might start getting traction in the industry while assuming there's only one computer in the world I care about and that I'm sitting in front of it, because that would be a huge step backwards.

chmike 14y ago
This exactly what worried me after reading this anoucement. If there is no remote display capability, it will be a regression.
- cdmckay 14y ago
  Why would it be a regression?

doublextremevil 14y ago

from Wayland creator Kristian Høgsberg: " things they claim wayland/weston input can't be extended to support: "... adjusting and extending X's input model is difficult and supporting features like input event batching and compression, motion event prediction together with associated power-saving strategies or flexible synchronization schemes for aligning input event delivery and rendering operations is (too) complex." is already implemented and working in weston today..." https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts

gvalkov 14y ago

Just wanted to mention that the news of Mir has hit wayland's mailing list[1]. I'm very curious to see what the wayland developers think of all this. A lot of work has already went into wayland and in making things work with it (gtk3, qt5, clutter etc). This is truly an ambitious project and I doubt that ubuntu engineers would needlessly want to write all of this from scratch if there weren't legitimate shortcomings in wayland's architecture. Personally, I'm looking forward to my wayland powered, fedora 20 desktop running the yet to be invented WMonad tiling window compositor. [1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-March/007770.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...

binarycrusader 14y ago

If this is going to have any real hope of replacing X it also needs to be licensed as liberally as X is, otherwise, it's doomed in many commercial sectors. (Current mir license appears to be GPLv3.)

scolex 14y ago

in the past when ubuntu was still "linux for human beings" they did great job polishing the linux and providing good linux experience. They were very good improvers. but then they decided to became inventors. But they don't have strong engineering background and their products were trash. upstart never provided advanced parallelism and was surpassed by systemd Top menu and indicators rely on d-bus -- really stupid idea and misuse of technology they abandon mutter+clutter for closed gl-canvas rendering library + compiz to be used in unity. Now is mutter+clutter far more advanced. Now they want to change wayland for mir? are they serious? They are not good at inventing things. They will just make linux fragmentation much worst. It's really problematic to make good drivers and gpu companies can't spend money and people on different linux platforms. ubuntu became from "linux for human beings" to "crappy mac-os like for poor"

mhw 14y ago

More interesting stuff from one of the developers here: http://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-as-a-new-home/ http://samohtv.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envis...

yk 14y ago

It appears that any sufficiently widely adopted Unix becomes a OS of its own. Examples include OSX, Android and increasingly Ubuntu. ( I have a wonderful proof for this, unfortunately HN does not allow to write into the margins.)

VLM 14y ago

No one has made the obvious comparison in the comments to ipv4 vs ipv6? The main issue with "yet another graphics protocol" is islanding. Right now all my "linux" boxes are more or less intercompatible. I can ssh -X whatever mythtv-setup and get the config GUI from a server that doesn't even have a monitor (not even sure if it has a graphics card?) Now I / we will inevitably have three little not too compatible islands of X, wayland, mir, who knows. My primary interest as an end user, because the machines "I do stuff on" are multiple huge headless servers and virtual images running on them, is network transparency. As long as a Mir keyboard/mouse/monitor can connect to a "real" system and give my my X when necessary, in a VNC like window or whatever if necessary, I'll be OK. Connectivity demands go both ways. If my refrigerator ends up running Ubuntu for its user interface, I'd really like to be able to remotely connect to it to mess with it.

stephen_g 14y ago
What comparison to IPv4 vs IPv6? There are very few parallels... I guess you could say that X and Wayland are like IPv4 and IPv6, where we strive for total migration to the new, better protocol, but in the meantime you can have a dual-stack setup with both that works fine. But it's not like anyone is coming in with a competitor to IPv6, so the analogy completely breaks down...

dakimov 14y ago

The worst thing is using C++ for a GUI engine. Don't do that mistake again! The code looks quite weak at the first glance, but at least not so ugly as average open-source code. The architecture solutions seem a bit weak too, even weaker than a GUI engine I have written being a junior developer. Overall, their code seems to be written by a junior developer. Seems to be too ambitious so far. The problem is that it is actually really hard to make a proper GUI engine. It requires enormous experience and amount of expertise, like you can come up with something decent after building a few your own engines and closely analyzing existing solutions.

Someone 14y ago

Anybody know what this will be licensed under? I would think (L)GPL, but https://launchpad.net/mir https://launchpad.net/mir isn't clear: "Licences: GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source (Boost Software License - Version 1.0) Commercial subscription expires 2022-09-24 This project’s licence has not been reviewed."

mzs 14y ago
COPYING indicates gpl3, main.cpp does as well, and so does the readme.

trotsky 14y ago

Did I read that correctly, there is no plan to build GTK+ bindings - they are going to qt based dekstop applications? Or do they expect gnome to port to mir? Unless they already worked that out it doesn't seem too likely as this amounts to a direct shot at them. If Ubuntu is suddenly not going to have any gtk applications available it is going to be a very foreign environment to lots of its current users.

unwind 14y ago
Not sure, they do say: Application authors relying on Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL etc. should not be required to perform additional porting as we will work on providing Mir integration for the most prominent toolkit choices. Maybe they've just decided to take Qt first, and that's why there's already a project for this. I'm a bit confused, I thought GTK+ did its rendering through Cairo, which would mean that a Cairo backend is what's needed. Not 100% sure about this though, I don't track GTK+ at a low level these days.

X4 14y ago

######### We need Borg efficiency!! SAR - We need fast driver development using safe and automatic "Template-Based" build systems. There is a lot GNU/Linux can learn from Embedded Systems development.

st3fan 14y ago

"Tailored towards an EGL/GL(ES) world" - this is obviously to make it easier for Canonical to run on (mobile) devices.

vsync 14y ago

> "beautiful"... "beautiful"... "beautiful". Really?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

morsch 14y ago

They also announced the successor to Unity will be based on Qt/QML... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5320633 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5320633

ElliotH 14y ago

Competition is good. Ubuntu seems to have their reasons not to want to use Wayland. Maybe Mir is awesome. Then I can move to it. If it's not so awesome then like Unity and Upstart I can ignore it. Seems to me the enemy here is the old fashioned clunky X server. Good. Two armies fighting the same target at least eliminates that target before they start fighting each other. Besides, if they both end up having support in all the major toolkits and they both have an X server fallback, then we should be able to meet in the middle somewhere eventually.

teeja 14y ago

Considering that Plasma (on my install) uses 100MB of RAM to work its wonders (I have no idea what or how), that alone makes me suspect there might be a better way.

lsiebert 14y ago

Either it will be better, worse, or a mixed bag. If it's better, Then they have improved the ecosystem, and the developers and users will follow. If it's worse, then we can hope they will switch back, or they will lose users/developers. The concern is a mixed bag... splitting development on something that may or may not ultimately win. But mixed bags lead to innovation more than having one true way. Ideas from Mir and Wayland and X can lead to all three of them improving more then if only one or two of them were viable. However the lack of focus may slow individual development. TL/DR Worst case is still not horrible, so long as Canonical recognizes it.

sandGorgon 14y ago

This is Ubuntu's "Bada" move - it is scared of being assimilated by Android that it is forgetting that it can truly innovate in the UX and not by building walled gardens around display managers. Ubuntu already has significant investment in Surfaceflinger/Android via its Touch vertical. It has also started migrating to QT/QML for its shell (which work really well on Android). There is a significant opportunity to innovate on UX (like Blackberry Z10), rather than throw away the ecosystem that would come with adopting an Android core. Yesterday, I couldnt join a GoToMeeting using Ubuntu. But just after, I did it in less than 2 minutes by using an app oumy Android device. That is a huge ecosystem, that I want to use on my desktop (I dont know how the desktop UX for a touch app will work, but I hope it will). I say that Ubuntu, Google and Valve should sit together and come up with a graphics+sound backend that will work together. And let me play Half Life 3 on my phone and desktop simultaneously !

lee 14y ago

Those who are complaining that Ubuntu is diverging from most other Linux distros forget that this is the nature of open source software and competition. Part of the success of open source software is that it's highly evolutionary. Good successful projects attract a following and get better. For this to happen, you have to have choice and diversity. There has to be competing flavors, libraries, and distros all vying for market share. What Ubuntu is doing is great for us all. Providing more alternatives in the Linux ecosystem than just relying on X/Wayland/Whatever.