24 ms·

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 abou

by 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
      [deleted]
    - Retric 14y ago
      WebKit for one has fairly wide adoption outside of pure Mac OS X. As for the rest of it, just because something is open source don't expect many people to use it.
      - gillianseed 14y ago
        Yes but then it's also being developed by far more companies than Apple. For 2012 Google submitted roughly twice as much code to Webkit as Apple (which came second), apart from them we have smaller yet notable contributors like RIM and Nokia (7% and 5% respectively).
        Retric 14y ago
        Let's not forget that reduced maintenance costs are often touted as a reason to opensource code in the first place. And when you consider it was developed by Apple and so presumably fit there needs well when released it as working code, it's not surprising that adapting it to new use cases involves more work than maintaining it.
        hdevalence 14y ago
        It was developed by the KDE project as KHTML. The reason that it's open-source is that it was Apple's fork of an existing free software project.
    - vor_ 14y ago
      You'd be complaining if they contributing nothing. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
      - phaemon 14y ago
        He said they weren't doing enough. You're pointing out he'd also complain if they did even less. Seriously?
  - macco 14y ago
    Apple is the biggest tech company in the world. Canonical is a company, that focuses on Linux User experience.
  - tedks 14y ago
    Didn't Apple buy CUPS specifically so that they could keep parts of it proprietary? They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC, which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.
    - tzs 14y ago
      > They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC Definitely and only? How did you determine this?
      - tedks 14y ago
        It's sort of obvious? I can't see any other reason Apple would have for it, other than making compilers researchers have slightly easier lives. It'd certainly make sense after they were forced to open source the frontend for Objective-C.
        tzs 14y ago
        Apple had two technical needs that GCC could not reasonably satisfy. One was to compile Core Image filters. When you make a chain of filters, they treat it as a single complicated filter which they JIT compile and optimize for your GPU or CPU (I believe they decide at run time which to target based on what will be best for the particular complex filter you have defined). Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers. Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.
        tedks 14y ago
        So would you say that Apple is definitely only funding LLVM so they can drop their dependency on GCC?
- hazov 14y ago
  Which standards are these? Besides using the kernel compiled with gcc and using dynamic linked ELF binaries as their default and a libc on the system the only standard that I ever knew of was LSB, which I believe does not include anything about graphics (I can be wrong).
  - noselasd 14y ago
    They're defacto standards. Not formal standards. The fact that you can compile and run a GTK program that will run on most linux and even other unix like systems without problem. It means that someone creating a program, proprietary or open source, can, with little effort run that program on most linux distros. We have quite a handful of internal GUI tools, some use Qt, some use GTK, written in python and some in C or C++. The GUI stack makes up the biggest stack here, but they use a few other libs as well, e.g. cURL, openssl, gsl. All these are readily available, and we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD beacuse of the defacto "standards" provided by these environments. Even porting these (at least some of them) to windows, where many of these libraries are available would take too much time because of minute details - there's other real problems we need to focus on. We hope we still can run these programs on Ubuntu in the future though, but it will not take that much to make it infeasible
    - hazov 14y ago
      I actually do share your fear. That's the reason I run Debian. I really hope this does not destroy Ubuntu as a Linux distribution (which I believe is the standard you and the poster I answered was referring to), as long as it remain based on Debian I believe there's little to fear.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Much more open. Like actually open. There is a reasonable case that there has been too little innovation in the last 10 years. I first used X Windows more than 20 years ago and it was amazing then but holding stuff back with old standards now?
- jjcm 14y ago
  Standards are great and all, but holding on to those standards is what's keeping back the UX of linux. Gnome3 is familiar, but very dated. X is supported by all, but it's a tangled mess that everyone hates. Yes Ubuntu is straying from the pack, but I'd rather have them stray and the rest follow when they find something good then have the entire linux community sit in the same place they have been for years. Regardless of what path Ubuntu takes, I think it will be good for the linux community to have that diversity.
  - thechut 14y ago
    Exactly this. My chosen distro is Linux Mint. Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction.
    - Cthulhu_ 14y ago
      > Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction. Like how Ubuntu is/was based off Debian but going its own direction? ;)
      - thechut 14y ago
        That's what open source is all about my friend! First distro I ever used was Debian, only as a live CD though because those were back in my WinXP days. But I immediately fell in love with apt. Then about 2 years ago I moved to Ubuntu, its nice but I didn't love Unity (didn't hate it either, just different). A friend recommended Mint, and I have been hooked ever since.
  - zobzu 14y ago
    Yeah, like Unity cough or upstart cough. RH is doing similar stuff, although they're more deeply involved, and while I don't especially like how they impose some of their technology, at least it's generally well though out.
    - signed0 14y ago
      Upstart is available in the Debian package repos, and it was used for a while by Red Hat before they switched to Systemd.
- mseebach 14y ago
  There are very few standards in the GNU/Linux world. GNU and Linux has, by themselves, become standards through ubiquity. POSIX is one, yes, but it's woefully inadequate when you've gotten used to all the bells and whistles any modern GNU/Linux distro puts on top of it by default. And what about the BSDs? They certainly doesn't play well with Linux, or vice versa, but that's hardly an argument for calling either an agent for closedness.
- dspeyer 14y ago
  Slightly more open? In what way is Ubuntu closed?
  - rrouse 14y ago
    They are not talking about Ubuntu being closed. They are saying that Ubuntu would drift toward being more like Mac OS X, but be more open than Apple is with Mac OS X.
    - dspeyer 14y ago
      They said "slightly". OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.
- zem 14y ago
  how is it "slightly more open"? from what i can see, all the code in ubuntu is open-source to the fullest extent of any accepted definition out there, including the full freedom to fork and start a distro that pulls from both ubuntu and third-party patches if you feel that canonical is not accepting said third-party patches readily enough.
- adeaver 14y ago
  On the one hand those standards came from somewhere, and that somewhere is likely someone else forking an existing project and making changes to it. On the other hand, adhering to standards that are years old isn't a great way to advance. Standards have to grow and adapt and, wait for it, change.
- buddylw 14y ago
  An open OS X, while slightly oxymoronic, sounds pretty fantastic to me.
- geon 14y ago
  > Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. That reason being that they grew out organically. And the landscape isn't even unified as it is! Mist distros come with Gnome, but you can run KDE if you are a bit more leet, or if you want something more lightweight you have xfce. Unless... I'm happy Ubuntu is showing some vision for what their OS can become and work towards that goal.
rmc 14y ago
On the other hand, innovation and inventing can be good. There are new things all the time (e.g. git).
pnathan 14y ago
I switched my personal computer from Ubuntu some time ago. It's kind of startling when you see the divergence from core Linux tooling that Ubuntu's been doing. I believe this is the kick in the pants my team at work needs to evaluate moving to Debian deployments instead of Ubuntu.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Yup, I can understand that, but it looks like Canonical are moving to phone/tablet/turn key device/fridge market anyway. I think there is room for Canonical with a slick tablet OS and Debian/RHEL clones/The Others (Arch/Slack &c) as 'traditional' OS
Symmetry 14y ago
Critically, they seem to be putting a lot of effort into being inter-operable with Wayland and X. We have two major widget toolkits and it's not a problem because I can use applications from both without any trouble.
oneweekwonder 14y ago
Canonical might have problems with the current de'facto toolchains of the GNU/Linux ecosystem, or it is to large or unmaintainable for what they want to do with it. Like you said maybe its a good idea, maybe its not. Starting clean you can take all the knowledge gained from previous open projects and create something fresh that is more lightweight, faster and easier to maintain. But will this new components live up to it expectations? Only time will tell, and Canonical is willing to back that venture. I also believe one need to stop calling linux, linux or the lesser adopted but more correct term for me GNU/Linux. Call the operating system you use by its distribution name, that is the actual ecosystem you using. Which yes, is part of a greater Open Source, Free Software ecosystem. But to achieve inovation one needs to boundaries, and at the moment Ubuntu is the OS on the desktop with most commercial and adoptions success. My 0.02c.
- zobzu 14y ago
  There's basically 2 ways for them right now: 1) Make the GNU/Linux stuff work on Android. That's what Tizen does, AFAIK. It's a lot of work. Advantage: everything works with it, and it's well understood. 2) Glue stuff up to work with whatever Android does. That's what they're aiming for. Advantage: less work.
  - zanny 14y ago
    Yet in the end, you pull the entire Linux FOSS community towards whatever whimsy Google is going on at any given time. If they suddenly redid the graphics API and threw out their current binary blob batch, the FOSS space would have to get back up and try again after getting the rug pulled out from under them. I don't see it as good if Google can lead FOSS desktop development around by a leash.
    - gillianseed 14y ago
      Are you saying that Canonical is the 'entire Linux FOSS community' ???
  - oneweekwonder 14y ago
simpsond 14y ago
They are not changing the path of Linux, but the path of graphical UX on Linux. I think it's a good thing. The GUI is simple enough for my grandma to use, yet I can open a terminal and have a very familiar experience. I see no harm here, as they will not diverge from Linux itself.
shmerl 14y ago
It doesn't sound like a good idea. What's wrong with Wayland?
- oneweekwonder 14y ago
  From the article, and I'm sorry if this seems condescending, I would truly love to have a conversation about this, but I believe your question is to vague: * 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. [1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Weston.3F https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Westo...
  - shmerl 14y ago
    What worries me is fragmentation of drivers. It can be a very serious problem. Possible scenario: Nvidia wait for broader Wayland adoption to release their driver for Wayland. Comes along Canonical and drops Mir on our heads. Nvidia scratch their heads and say - forget Wayland. Not sure if they'll say forget Mir as well - they have better things to do than to deal with this mess, but all this doesn't sound good already. Consider games development. People wait for better drivers (Wayland)? They aren't coming. Should they say forget this mess (Linux)? Or Canonical think they should refocus all driver development on Mir like Android did on mobile creating a horrible fragmentation again?
    - oneweekwonder 14y ago
      I don't take the driver situation into consideration and it seems that Ubuntu is contacting closed source manufactures to allow driver support for mir. I like your scenario because I believe a interesting element is that Valve is trying to port most of its Steam games to Ubuntu and they do have muscle with Nvidia and AMD. And with the rumours that the steambox called Piston would be based on Ubuntu. So in my opinion it looks bad for distro's not using mir and good for distro's using mir. If that is a good thing altogether is another debate. And as mentioned above profesional game development to Ubuntu is coming at a rapid pace. Maybe at the price of another horrible fragmentation as you call it.
rdtsc 14y ago
In terms of user interface have those standards delivered? I remember fonts being really screwed up for a long time. Longer that it should have been. Just getting anti-aliased fonts was major deal. Then graphics drivers are a mess. I blame manufacturers of devices here. But still treating it as a black box I just see that is inferior. I know Linus flipped of NVidia but at the same time is a chicken and egg problem. Why should they bother to improve their drivers? To make GNOME 2 desktops look shinier? You criticized Compiz, ok, what is the alternative? Google did pretty much the same with Android. We have surfaceflinger, dalvik, custom IPC mechanisms. Now they are trying to slowly merge some of them in. > Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. That is what I think. Here is a company that tried to push and everyone resisted and said "you must adhere to standards defined by a 20 year old plus graphical server". I think that is silly. Let them innovate. I for one, am excited for them.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Yes. I shall follow with interest and run Ubuntu if my hardware allows. CentOS and Debian are there as lifeboats if needed. Choice is good!
  - rz2k 14y ago
    Is Mint with Debian finally taking off? That has the potential to be a really easy choice for desktop users, but a couple years ago it wasn't very smooth at all.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  > Let them innovate If Canonical were good at it, everybody would be saying "yeah, go for it!" But they're not. Every time they strike out on their own, they seem to end up producing overly complex, badly performing, messes, with tons of issues, that everybody hates. bzr, unity, ... The only reason people use any of their stuff is because ubuntu pushes it on their users, and people with little experience end up using it by default. Sound familiar...? [Worse, with Mir, they seem to going for the lockin effect: "mir will integrate especially well with unity"... >< ] That perception, that Canonical is not competing on fair terms—almost anything they come up with, no matter how awful, will come with a built-in user base—is one of the big reasons they get so much flack for this sort of thing. If it were just some guy in his garage hacking on his new display server after lunch every day (like, you know, Wayland...), and gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye. For that reason, I think people expect more maturity from an influential company like Canonical. They expect them to play nicely and work with others (e.g., if they think they've identified issues with wayland, work to fix wayland; or cooperate in designing a next-generation replacement) instead of striking out boldly on their own every 15 minutes. Again, if they had proven really good at it, they'd get a pass to some degree—but they haven't. Instead, by making technical merit less of a factor in determining what becomes widely used, they're effectively reducing the overall quality of FOSS. Can you blame people for being annoyed?
prg318 14y ago
One of the largest issues that I can foresee with this is proprietary drivers for graphics cards. NVIDIA has delivered high quality drivers for Linux/X11 for their cards and tend to release new drivers quickly when new X11 versions are released. Are gfx hardware manufacturers expected to support separate drivers for Linux (X11) and Ubuntu (mir)? and potentially distributions that use Wayland? I can only imagine how AMD/ATI will handle putting out graphics drivers for some other windowing system that Ubuntu decides to use. From TFA: "Right now, Mir does not run on desktop hardware that requires closed source drivers. However, we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind." Good luck with that. How many years did it take to get decent AMD drivers for Linux/X11? The catalyst X11 drivers are still currently a mess.
- brigade 14y ago
  > Ability to leverage existing drivers implementing the Android driver model [1] This is huge for ARM; very few vendors bother developing any sort of an OpenGL driver for X11, and drivers for same GPU often not only SoC specific, but sometimes device specific as well. [1] http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-as-a-new-home/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ubuntu-news+%28Ubuntu+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisione...
shurcooL 14y ago
As long as what Ubuntu is creating is open source and easily adopted by others (if it's good), what's the problem?
- rodgerd 14y ago
  Wayland is already mostly there, was put together by experienced X developers who've given up on trying to make X do everything modern display environments work. The main problem with moving away from X has been the lack of a single, demonstrably better target to move to. Mir will fragment that effort, and the rationale seems to be "NIH".
- stephen_g 14y ago
  The 'if it's good' part is the problem... Canonical don't exactly have a good record of creating well-engineered software...
geon 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. Mir is FOSS too.
tzs 14y ago
> Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu. I'd rather know Unix, not GNU/Linux or Ubuntu. Maybe Ubuntu diverging a bit from other Linux distributions, and from GNU, will encourage people to write portable code.
mistercow 14y ago
>But it worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. It's a little distressing, I agree, but on the other hand, are you ever really "out on your own" when you have a big user base and your code is GPL?
benev 14y ago
Would you care to elaborate on why you dislike launchpad? I haven't used it as a developer, but as a user I've found it really useful, particularly the way it integrates with apt-get via PPAs.
mindcrime 14y ago
I don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing or not. I mean, sure, it's handy to be able to switch distros seamlessly, but has that ever really been possible (aside from going from, say, Ubuntu to Debian, or Fedora to CentOS)? Going from Fedora to Ubuntu or vice versa, for example, has never really been a completely seamless experience. It's always been the case that, in the strictest sense, "Linux" is a kernel, not an Operating System, and each distro is really it's own OS. That they had a lot in common was a fortunate bit of happenstance in a lot of ways. Now, they start to diverge, that may mean more competition, which should lead to faster innovation and even more progress. And as long as everything is F/OSS, the distros that pick a bit of tech that "loses" can always switch to the "winner" later. I'm not saying that it would be totally pain free, mind you. But I can see how this sort of move might benefit everyone in the long run.

by acabal 14y ago

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
    [deleted]
  - Retric 14y ago
    WebKit for one has fairly wide adoption outside of pure Mac OS X. As for the rest of it, just because something is open source don't expect many people to use it.
    - gillianseed 14y ago
      Yes but then it's also being developed by far more companies than Apple. For 2012 Google submitted roughly twice as much code to Webkit as Apple (which came second), apart from them we have smaller yet notable contributors like RIM and Nokia (7% and 5% respectively).
      - Retric 14y ago
        Let's not forget that reduced maintenance costs are often touted as a reason to opensource code in the first place. And when you consider it was developed by Apple and so presumably fit there needs well when released it as working code, it's not surprising that adapting it to new use cases involves more work than maintaining it.
        hdevalence 14y ago
        It was developed by the KDE project as KHTML. The reason that it's open-source is that it was Apple's fork of an existing free software project.
  - vor_ 14y ago
    You'd be complaining if they contributing nothing. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
    - phaemon 14y ago
      He said they weren't doing enough. You're pointing out he'd also complain if they did even less. Seriously?
- macco 14y ago
  Apple is the biggest tech company in the world. Canonical is a company, that focuses on Linux User experience.
- tedks 14y ago
  Didn't Apple buy CUPS specifically so that they could keep parts of it proprietary? They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC, which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.
  - tzs 14y ago
    > They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC Definitely and only? How did you determine this?
    - tedks 14y ago
      It's sort of obvious? I can't see any other reason Apple would have for it, other than making compilers researchers have slightly easier lives. It'd certainly make sense after they were forced to open source the frontend for Objective-C.
      - tzs 14y ago
        Apple had two technical needs that GCC could not reasonably satisfy. One was to compile Core Image filters. When you make a chain of filters, they treat it as a single complicated filter which they JIT compile and optimize for your GPU or CPU (I believe they decide at run time which to target based on what will be best for the particular complex filter you have defined). Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers. Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.
        tedks 14y ago
        So would you say that Apple is definitely only funding LLVM so they can drop their dependency on GCC?
hazov 14y ago
Which standards are these? Besides using the kernel compiled with gcc and using dynamic linked ELF binaries as their default and a libc on the system the only standard that I ever knew of was LSB, which I believe does not include anything about graphics (I can be wrong).
- noselasd 14y ago
  They're defacto standards. Not formal standards. The fact that you can compile and run a GTK program that will run on most linux and even other unix like systems without problem. It means that someone creating a program, proprietary or open source, can, with little effort run that program on most linux distros. We have quite a handful of internal GUI tools, some use Qt, some use GTK, written in python and some in C or C++. The GUI stack makes up the biggest stack here, but they use a few other libs as well, e.g. cURL, openssl, gsl. All these are readily available, and we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD beacuse of the defacto "standards" provided by these environments. Even porting these (at least some of them) to windows, where many of these libraries are available would take too much time because of minute details - there's other real problems we need to focus on. We hope we still can run these programs on Ubuntu in the future though, but it will not take that much to make it infeasible
  - hazov 14y ago
    I actually do share your fear. That's the reason I run Debian. I really hope this does not destroy Ubuntu as a Linux distribution (which I believe is the standard you and the poster I answered was referring to), as long as it remain based on Debian I believe there's little to fear.
justincormack 14y ago
Much more open. Like actually open. There is a reasonable case that there has been too little innovation in the last 10 years. I first used X Windows more than 20 years ago and it was amazing then but holding stuff back with old standards now?
jjcm 14y ago
Standards are great and all, but holding on to those standards is what's keeping back the UX of linux. Gnome3 is familiar, but very dated. X is supported by all, but it's a tangled mess that everyone hates. Yes Ubuntu is straying from the pack, but I'd rather have them stray and the rest follow when they find something good then have the entire linux community sit in the same place they have been for years. Regardless of what path Ubuntu takes, I think it will be good for the linux community to have that diversity.
- thechut 14y ago
  Exactly this. My chosen distro is Linux Mint. Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction.
  - Cthulhu_ 14y ago
    > Based on Ubuntu but going its own direction. Like how Ubuntu is/was based off Debian but going its own direction? ;)
    - thechut 14y ago
      That's what open source is all about my friend! First distro I ever used was Debian, only as a live CD though because those were back in my WinXP days. But I immediately fell in love with apt. Then about 2 years ago I moved to Ubuntu, its nice but I didn't love Unity (didn't hate it either, just different). A friend recommended Mint, and I have been hooked ever since.
- zobzu 14y ago
  Yeah, like Unity cough or upstart cough. RH is doing similar stuff, although they're more deeply involved, and while I don't especially like how they impose some of their technology, at least it's generally well though out.
  - signed0 14y ago
    Upstart is available in the Debian package repos, and it was used for a while by Red Hat before they switched to Systemd.
mseebach 14y ago
There are very few standards in the GNU/Linux world. GNU and Linux has, by themselves, become standards through ubiquity. POSIX is one, yes, but it's woefully inadequate when you've gotten used to all the bells and whistles any modern GNU/Linux distro puts on top of it by default. And what about the BSDs? They certainly doesn't play well with Linux, or vice versa, but that's hardly an argument for calling either an agent for closedness.
dspeyer 14y ago
Slightly more open? In what way is Ubuntu closed?
- rrouse 14y ago
  They are not talking about Ubuntu being closed. They are saying that Ubuntu would drift toward being more like Mac OS X, but be more open than Apple is with Mac OS X.
  - dspeyer 14y ago
    They said "slightly". OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.
zem 14y ago
how is it "slightly more open"? from what i can see, all the code in ubuntu is open-source to the fullest extent of any accepted definition out there, including the full freedom to fork and start a distro that pulls from both ubuntu and third-party patches if you feel that canonical is not accepting said third-party patches readily enough.
adeaver 14y ago
On the one hand those standards came from somewhere, and that somewhere is likely someone else forking an existing project and making changes to it. On the other hand, adhering to standards that are years old isn't a great way to advance. Standards have to grow and adapt and, wait for it, change.
buddylw 14y ago
An open OS X, while slightly oxymoronic, sounds pretty fantastic to me.
geon 14y ago
> Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. That reason being that they grew out organically. And the landscape isn't even unified as it is! Mist distros come with Gnome, but you can run KDE if you are a bit more leet, or if you want something more lightweight you have xfce. Unless... I'm happy Ubuntu is showing some vision for what their OS can become and work towards that goal.

rmc 14y ago

On the other hand, innovation and inventing can be good. There are new things all the time (e.g. git).

pnathan 14y ago

I switched my personal computer from Ubuntu some time ago. It's kind of startling when you see the divergence from core Linux tooling that Ubuntu's been doing. I believe this is the kick in the pants my team at work needs to evaluate moving to Debian deployments instead of Ubuntu.

keithpeter 14y ago
Yup, I can understand that, but it looks like Canonical are moving to phone/tablet/turn key device/fridge market anyway. I think there is room for Canonical with a slick tablet OS and Debian/RHEL clones/The Others (Arch/Slack &c) as 'traditional' OS

Symmetry 14y ago

Critically, they seem to be putting a lot of effort into being inter-operable with Wayland and X. We have two major widget toolkits and it's not a problem because I can use applications from both without any trouble.

oneweekwonder 14y ago

Canonical might have problems with the current de'facto toolchains of the GNU/Linux ecosystem, or it is to large or unmaintainable for what they want to do with it. Like you said maybe its a good idea, maybe its not. Starting clean you can take all the knowledge gained from previous open projects and create something fresh that is more lightweight, faster and easier to maintain. But will this new components live up to it expectations? Only time will tell, and Canonical is willing to back that venture. I also believe one need to stop calling linux, linux or the lesser adopted but more correct term for me GNU/Linux. Call the operating system you use by its distribution name, that is the actual ecosystem you using. Which yes, is part of a greater Open Source, Free Software ecosystem. But to achieve inovation one needs to boundaries, and at the moment Ubuntu is the OS on the desktop with most commercial and adoptions success. My 0.02c.

zobzu 14y ago
There's basically 2 ways for them right now: 1) Make the GNU/Linux stuff work on Android. That's what Tizen does, AFAIK. It's a lot of work. Advantage: everything works with it, and it's well understood. 2) Glue stuff up to work with whatever Android does. That's what they're aiming for. Advantage: less work.
- zanny 14y ago
  Yet in the end, you pull the entire Linux FOSS community towards whatever whimsy Google is going on at any given time. If they suddenly redid the graphics API and threw out their current binary blob batch, the FOSS space would have to get back up and try again after getting the rug pulled out from under them. I don't see it as good if Google can lead FOSS desktop development around by a leash.
  - gillianseed 14y ago
    Are you saying that Canonical is the 'entire Linux FOSS community' ???
- oneweekwonder 14y ago

simpsond 14y ago

They are not changing the path of Linux, but the path of graphical UX on Linux. I think it's a good thing. The GUI is simple enough for my grandma to use, yet I can open a terminal and have a very familiar experience. I see no harm here, as they will not diverge from Linux itself.

shmerl 14y ago

It doesn't sound like a good idea. What's wrong with Wayland?

oneweekwonder 14y ago
From the article, and I'm sorry if this seems condescending, I would truly love to have a conversation about this, but I believe your question is to vague: * 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. [1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Weston.3F https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Westo...
- shmerl 14y ago
  What worries me is fragmentation of drivers. It can be a very serious problem. Possible scenario: Nvidia wait for broader Wayland adoption to release their driver for Wayland. Comes along Canonical and drops Mir on our heads. Nvidia scratch their heads and say - forget Wayland. Not sure if they'll say forget Mir as well - they have better things to do than to deal with this mess, but all this doesn't sound good already. Consider games development. People wait for better drivers (Wayland)? They aren't coming. Should they say forget this mess (Linux)? Or Canonical think they should refocus all driver development on Mir like Android did on mobile creating a horrible fragmentation again?
  - oneweekwonder 14y ago
    I don't take the driver situation into consideration and it seems that Ubuntu is contacting closed source manufactures to allow driver support for mir. I like your scenario because I believe a interesting element is that Valve is trying to port most of its Steam games to Ubuntu and they do have muscle with Nvidia and AMD. And with the rumours that the steambox called Piston would be based on Ubuntu. So in my opinion it looks bad for distro's not using mir and good for distro's using mir. If that is a good thing altogether is another debate. And as mentioned above profesional game development to Ubuntu is coming at a rapid pace. Maybe at the price of another horrible fragmentation as you call it.

rdtsc 14y ago

In terms of user interface have those standards delivered? I remember fonts being really screwed up for a long time. Longer that it should have been. Just getting anti-aliased fonts was major deal. Then graphics drivers are a mess. I blame manufacturers of devices here. But still treating it as a black box I just see that is inferior. I know Linus flipped of NVidia but at the same time is a chicken and egg problem. Why should they bother to improve their drivers? To make GNOME 2 desktops look shinier? You criticized Compiz, ok, what is the alternative? Google did pretty much the same with Android. We have surfaceflinger, dalvik, custom IPC mechanisms. Now they are trying to slowly merge some of them in. > Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. That is what I think. Here is a company that tried to push and everyone resisted and said "you must adhere to standards defined by a 20 year old plus graphical server". I think that is silly. Let them innovate. I for one, am excited for them.

keithpeter 14y ago
Yes. I shall follow with interest and run Ubuntu if my hardware allows. CentOS and Debian are there as lifeboats if needed. Choice is good!
- rz2k 14y ago
  Is Mint with Debian finally taking off? That has the potential to be a really easy choice for desktop users, but a couple years ago it wasn't very smooth at all.
snogglethorpe 14y ago
> Let them innovate If Canonical were good at it, everybody would be saying "yeah, go for it!" But they're not. Every time they strike out on their own, they seem to end up producing overly complex, badly performing, messes, with tons of issues, that everybody hates. bzr, unity, ... The only reason people use any of their stuff is because ubuntu pushes it on their users, and people with little experience end up using it by default. Sound familiar...? [Worse, with Mir, they seem to going for the lockin effect: "mir will integrate especially well with unity"... >< ] That perception, that Canonical is not competing on fair terms—almost anything they come up with, no matter how awful, will come with a built-in user base—is one of the big reasons they get so much flack for this sort of thing. If it were just some guy in his garage hacking on his new display server after lunch every day (like, you know, Wayland...), and gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye. For that reason, I think people expect more maturity from an influential company like Canonical. They expect them to play nicely and work with others (e.g., if they think they've identified issues with wayland, work to fix wayland; or cooperate in designing a next-generation replacement) instead of striking out boldly on their own every 15 minutes. Again, if they had proven really good at it, they'd get a pass to some degree—but they haven't. Instead, by making technical merit less of a factor in determining what becomes widely used, they're effectively reducing the overall quality of FOSS. Can you blame people for being annoyed?

prg318 14y ago

One of the largest issues that I can foresee with this is proprietary drivers for graphics cards. NVIDIA has delivered high quality drivers for Linux/X11 for their cards and tend to release new drivers quickly when new X11 versions are released. Are gfx hardware manufacturers expected to support separate drivers for Linux (X11) and Ubuntu (mir)? and potentially distributions that use Wayland? I can only imagine how AMD/ATI will handle putting out graphics drivers for some other windowing system that Ubuntu decides to use. From TFA: "Right now, Mir does not run on desktop hardware that requires closed source drivers. However, we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind." Good luck with that. How many years did it take to get decent AMD drivers for Linux/X11? The catalyst X11 drivers are still currently a mess.

brigade 14y ago
> Ability to leverage existing drivers implementing the Android driver model [1] This is huge for ARM; very few vendors bother developing any sort of an OpenGL driver for X11, and drivers for same GPU often not only SoC specific, but sometimes device specific as well. [1] http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisioned-as-a-new-home/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ubuntu-news+%28Ubuntu+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisione...

shurcooL 14y ago

As long as what Ubuntu is creating is open source and easily adopted by others (if it's good), what's the problem?

rodgerd 14y ago
Wayland is already mostly there, was put together by experienced X developers who've given up on trying to make X do everything modern display environments work. The main problem with moving away from X has been the lack of a single, demonstrably better target to move to. Mir will fragment that effort, and the rationale seems to be "NIH".
stephen_g 14y ago
The 'if it's good' part is the problem... Canonical don't exactly have a good record of creating well-engineered software...

geon 14y ago

tzs 14y ago

> Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu. I'd rather know Unix, not GNU/Linux or Ubuntu. Maybe Ubuntu diverging a bit from other Linux distributions, and from GNU, will encourage people to write portable code.

mistercow 14y ago

>But it worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. It's a little distressing, I agree, but on the other hand, are you ever really "out on your own" when you have a big user base and your code is GPL?

benev 14y ago

Would you care to elaborate on why you dislike launchpad? I haven't used it as a developer, but as a user I've found it really useful, particularly the way it integrates with apt-get via PPAs.

mindcrime 14y ago

I don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing or not. I mean, sure, it's handy to be able to switch distros seamlessly, but has that ever really been possible (aside from going from, say, Ubuntu to Debian, or Fedora to CentOS)? Going from Fedora to Ubuntu or vice versa, for example, has never really been a completely seamless experience. It's always been the case that, in the strictest sense, "Linux" is a kernel, not an Operating System, and each distro is really it's own OS. That they had a lot in common was a fortunate bit of happenstance in a lot of ways. Now, they start to diverge, that may mean more competition, which should lead to faster innovation and even more progress. And as long as everything is F/OSS, the distros that pick a bit of tech that "loses" can always switch to the "winner" later. I'm not saying that it would be totally pain free, mind you. But I can see how this sort of move might benefit everyone in the long run.