17 ms·

Ubuntu 13.10 to ship with Mir instead of X

164 points by tmzt 13y ago

jlgreco 13y ago
What is the point of Mir existing? I get that Mir added support for Android GPU drivers, but hasn't Wayland since added that in response? Are there any other advantages besides satiating their "not invented here" problem?
- timpattinson 13y ago
  This blog seems to explain some of the reasoning (http://blog.cooperteam.net/ http://blog.cooperteam.net/), but IMO I don't think Mir is worth the fragmentation it will create.
  - D9u 13y ago
    That fragmentation is exactly why I chose FreeBSD nearly a year ago. As the old adage goes: FreeBSD is what you get when Unix developers get together and create a Unix-like system for the PC platform. Linux is what you get when PC developers get together and create a Unix-like system for PC.
    - jbrechtel 13y ago
      Are you using FreeBSD on a laptop?
      - 3825 13y ago
        Are you referring to this xkcd? http://xkcd.com/349/ http://xkcd.com/349/
        hillbillyjack 13y ago
        I doubt he is, it has been hard to get FreeBSD working on any laptop that isn't specifically supported by someone. You can see many non-working things here: http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/ http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/ from no sound to can't boot. Power management is also notoriously bad so you need your laptop to be plugged in. It is reminiscent of Linux a few years ago when everyone with brand new laptops tried to install it. FreeBSD is still fine on desktop systems and even works quite well for a desktop in some cases, but Linux is just so big at this point that it supports more things, while FreeBSD has always seemed more server oriented.
        D9u 13y ago
        FreeBSD is still fine on desktop systems and even works quite well for a desktop in some cases, but Linux is just so big at this point that it supports more things, while FreeBSD has always seemed more server oriented. Apparently you have not tried FreeBSD on an Acer Aspire One netbook, because if you did you would realize that your last paragraph is outdated by at least 3 minor version iterations. I first tried PC-BSD 8.x in 2009, and with KDE as the default DE it unusably slow, but when I tried FreeBSD 8.x last year I was pleasantly suprised with how well the system ran on my little netbook. Then, when I upgraded to 9.0 I realized that I had finally found what I had been searching for all these years. Now, with 9.1 the system is even better.
        synchronise 13y ago
        I used to run a PC-BSD system and it pretty much worked out of the box, that is until I got an AMD 6* series video card but I hear the radeon driver is being developed and very close to being integrated into FreeBSD 10 and backported to 9. Yes, FreeBSD lacks some features that Linux has, but it's still being developed and it has its uses outside of the server market too. For example, Sony is reportedly using it as the core OS for the new PS4 and there's a project that is aiming to create a HUD device which is also based on FreeBSD, http://hmdviking.blogspot.jp/ http://hmdviking.blogspot.jp/
        asveikau 13y ago
        A few years ago I ran OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. Worked well. It was a lot like Linux used to be in the late 90s though... I tried to put it on a few other machines with less success.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        jbrechtel 13y ago
        Haha, no. I was just curious about the feasibility these days of FreeBSD on a laptop.
      - D9u 13y ago
        I've been running FreeBSD on my netbook since last autumn and it's more responsive, and noticeably faster than #!, which I tried out last month. (I just reinstalled FBSD last night) Crunchbang just doesn't compare as far as speed goes. I tested both OS' with Xfce4.1, as well as no DE with dwm & dmenu. In each case FreeBSD blows crunchbang away, and this is on an Intel Atom N270 with 1 GB RAM. The only thing #! has going for it is ease of setup, but FreeBSD isn't that hard to setup and use, and all questions I've had are easily answered by reading the FreeBSD Handbook. Some will decry FBSD's support for suspend/hibernate, but since I never use those features it's a non issue for me. That said, I do believe that suspend, etc, is working for some laptops, although YMMV.
        pyre 13y ago
        | Some will decry FBSD's support for | suspend/hibernate, but since I never | use those features it's a non issue for me. This is how most people use a laptop. While that may be perfectly fine for you, that doesn't work for a lot of people.
        D9u 13y ago
        A 12 cell battery lasts a long time on this little netbook. But you're right, I'm not most people.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        How do you pack up your laptop and bring it somewhere else without it melting down in the bag? Just make sure nothing is burning CPU, pack it up, and hope for the best?
        hobs 13y ago
        I assume he uses the shut down feature.
        D9u 13y ago
        Of course. Why does the netbook have to stay running if I'm not using it? Sometimes the simplest things are so abstruse to some of us.
    - zanny 13y ago
      So don't take consideration for Dragonflybsd, OpenBSD, or the biggest elephant in the bsd fork room, OSX. FOSS will fragment because people have different opinions and are passionate about the choices they make in the software to create and use. There is no alternative, because in free software the developer has last say. There is no school of "the one way" of how to do anything in foss, the only possible proxy being the popularity of the software created.
      - vidarh 13y ago
        Don't forget NetBSD.
    - gwu78 13y ago
      I like that old adage. I actually had never heard it. I think BSD's success with i386 has brought the stark pragmatism of the "server" to the PC. The dream of BSDI. The reliability, robustness and the uniformity. Maybe BSD UNIX is not as "fun" as MS and Apple, but it _works_ the best. Relatively minimal bloat. And things can be removed relatively easily. Getting small is not frowned upon or ignored as a worthy objective. "The hero is the negative coder." (credit: Doug McIlroy, one of the original UNIX developers) Linux OTOH (a horde of wannabe kernel hackers and a gazillion idiosyncratic GNU programs) has brought the chaos of the PC[1] to the idea of "UNIX". There is bloat and endless tweaking around every corner. The vigilance and skill it takes to make your Linux small and simple and actually keep it that way is, IME, quite the burden. The respect for the user also differs. Man pages? I guess the assumption is we'll just read the code when we have a question. But then there's also an expectation we'll use binary packages. Linux just makes my head spin. I'm just not smart enough to use it. I wish I was... because they have better hardware support. Based on what I've seen, I doubt many a Linux developer would think "The hero is the negative coder." Linux just keeps growing and becoming more complex and unwieldy. And so by comparison, IMO, Linux less embodies the idea of UNIX than BSD. 1. The Windows experience of constantly searching for some non-MS program to do some task that base Windows itself can't even begin to handle... and you end up with an ad hoc mess of programs that barely do what you need, and most of them poorly written by who knows who.
      - Ologn 13y ago
        I had an appreciation for FreeBSD. They were smart about some things. Especially circa 1996 era. It was an easy install. Pop in a 3.5" disk and do a network install. It had drivers and automagic support for obscure ethernet cards which Linux did not support at that time. It even had an easy modem install. When I needed a small server quick I'd buy a PC from a store, pop a disk in it and network install FreeBSD. Get up a DNS, mail or web server in no time. Making the install process easy can help an OS get out there a lot. The servers were sturdy and good too. A nice ports system for applications - better than dpkg or rpm at the time. It just worked. The install itself was a thing of beauty - no hassles. FreeBSD 1996 beats Gentoo 2013 in that department. As far as bloat, some BSDs are more elegant, but I do not think Linux is that bloated. It is small enough to succeed on embedded systems and Androids. The device driver section is bloated, but the core system is not as bad. Yes, Ubuntu is not small and simple, but Debian is if you want it to be.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      I've dropped Fedora and switched to Debian stable in anticipation of avoiding Wayland/Mir for as many years as possible. I'm not worried about fragmentation, I'm just tired of being an early adopter.
      - ludoo 13y ago
        +1
      - chris_wot 13y ago
        I must be missing something. My understanding is that they implement the X protocol via a wrapper layer. Aside from a display manager/compositor, what is going to fragment?
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Well now there is Mir, Wayland, and X, instead of just X. Just right there you now have three codebases instead of one, so that is fragmentation in itself. Is it harmful fragmentation? I think that remains to be seen. I'm not worried about fragmentation though. My position is that currently X "Just Works" for me and I am not willing to sacrifice this stability so that I can test out the pet projects of a bunch of Red Hat and Canonical employees. I figure I have at least 3 years, hopefully 5, before I will be forced to switch. (3 years left on wheezy, and hopefully 2 more years with jessie assuming X is still the default and viable). 3-5 years to let them work out all of the kinks? Yes please, I'll take that. The dust sure as hell better be settled by 2018.
        bkor 13y ago
        A lot of the Wayland developers are X developers. It basically is X12, just that calling it X results in a lot of unneeded steps (loads of people will have a say into the spec, etc). Daniel Stone explained this in a video.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Whatever it is, I want nothing to do with it until everyone else has had and solved the problems.
  - synchronise 13y ago
    Every FOSS project has the possibility of creating fragmentation, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Greater software selection allows more choice and offers a better environment for competition. Some will win over others, some will find a niche market to cater, and others will be in continual completion with each other with an almost split marketshare. And while you may feel as though Mir's only aim is to fragment the Linux community, keep in mind that Ubuntu will be using QML extensively and that will be compatible with Wayland, and through the use of libhybris both Mir and Wayland can target the same display driver.
    - ewzimm 13y ago
      Thank you. I am tired of people telling developers to stop making things, especially other developers. This is how evolution works. You have to try multiple approaches and see what works. If you have the money and developers to scratch an itch the way you want to, do it. If it works out, everyone benefits. If it doesn't work, everyone benefits by learning what went wrong. Those advocating that everyone pick one standard and stick to it are missing the point of distributed development.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        The old guys here know how the UNIX wars ended up. Supporting the idea of the jour has development costs.
        jessaustin 13y ago
        ...how the UNIX wars ended up. I'm sorry, how was that? My recollection seems to be that they all got stale and overpriced, and then GNU/Linux ate their lunch.
        pjmlp 13y ago
        It ended up with fragmentation everywhere, code full of #ifdef spaghetti to cater for all UNIX variants that one needs to support and increased development costs.
  - anonymous 13y ago
    I'm thinking that before too long there will be WayMir and MirLand shims to let you run wayland-only programs on mir and vice-versa. Then you can run Unity in Mir in XMir through MirLand on Wayland on XWayland on WayMir on Mir on Mir (the international space station).
    - tudborg 13y ago
      did you just refer to ISS as Mir? Really?
      - akiselev 13y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir
  - qznc 13y ago
    Fragmentation has a cost, because higher levels (Qt,Gtk,etc in this case) must use portability layers. However, staying in one project also has costs: much more discussion and politics.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Both Qt and Gtk has long had explicit support for different backends. Whether or not the user uses an X backend or a Wayland backend or a Mir backend should have minimal impact.
      - bkor 13y ago
        In practice, Gtk+ will have to deprecate a few things to better support Wayland. See https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/GTK%2B https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/GTK%2B and https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/Gaps https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/Gaps. Mir and Wayland seem to be pretty related though. Same gaps that Wayland has (needing development time) also are with Mir AFAIK. So once fixed for Wayland, Mir will have it easy :P Note that real Mir support is only planned for 14.10. At the moment it is just XMir, which is totally different from the what is going on with Wayland (goal is native, this is way more difficult). I have seen the development that is needed to get Wayland really working, Mir seems way behind on this though they probably can copy what was done for Wayland and pretend they did it :P
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    > I don't think Mir is worth the fragmentation it will create "Fragmentation" is another name for "diversity". Diversity and selection are key factors for healthy evolution and a key advantage of open-source.
    - laumars 13y ago
      Some things are better to be standardised than diversified. eg networking protocols and display managers.
      - rbanffy 13y ago
        AFAIK, a program written for X will run unmodified on an Ubuntu box running Mir.
        laumars 13y ago
        Not exactly. X can run atop of Mir, but then you're adding additional bloat to what is already a rather bloated distro of Linux.
- wmf 13y ago
  Wayland doesn't use TDD.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  Mir heavily emulates Android's SurfaceFlinger design, and Canonical claims it'll be a better fit for Ubuntu for smartphones. Highly debatable whether that'll actually hold true. In any case, there's no fundamental design flaw in Wayland; this just seems like a common case of NIH.
  - colanderman 13y ago
    there's no fundamental design flaw in Wayland Except that window management is tightly coupled to display management. The Mir developers seem to at least seem to care about software modularity.
    - JoshTriplett 13y ago
      > window management is tightly coupled to display management. Yes, it is, both in general and in Wayland. Specifically, what would once have been called just a window manager now needs to be a compositing manager, managing window contents and compositing them onto the screen. That compositing manager also needs to handle input, since input depends on where, how, and if windows are rendered. And once you're handling all of that, there's nothing useful left that corresponds to an X server other than graphics memory buffer management, which is the kernel's job these days. Wayland handles software modularity by providing a library for use by prospective compositing managers. Moving the compositing manager into a separate process from the thing actually doing the rendering does not add a useful form of modularity.
      - colanderman 13y ago
        Yes, it is, both in general Citation? X11 window managers are decoupled from the rest of X and the OS by well-specified protocols. That compositing manager also needs to handle input Oh yes, I forgot how Wayland couples the WM to the OS as well. Wayland handles software modularity by providing a library for use by prospective compositing managers. Moving the compositing manager into a separate process from the thing actually doing the rendering does not add a useful form of modularity. 1) Can you point me to an API specification for Wayland compositor libraries? If not, it's not decoupled. 2) Can one switch window managers without restarting the compositor (and thus losing window state) with Wayland? If not, it's missing a "useful form of modularity" provided by X11.
- kklimonda 13y ago
  There is a good link below with some technical rationale (I think the most important part, at least according to Canonical developers, is "Server Allocated Buffers in Mir"), but I'm actually wondering - has Wayland officially added the support for working on the Android graphics stack? There has been at least two proof-of-concept projects, but I don't see either of them being actually committed to the Wayland repository. Given that Canonical is working against the clock it's not that surprising that they are going with their own solution - they obviously believe that they can get it working faster.
  - teho 13y ago
    The lead developer of libhybris (the project that makes it possible to run Android drivers on GNU/Linux and also what Canonical uses with Mir) is working on support for Android drivers on Wayland. http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-and... http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-and...
  - bkor 13y ago
    That was working on Wayland before it was working on Mir.
- edderly 13y ago
  Realpolitik. Although Wayland 'could' support Android based/styled graphics drivers Mir should be able to work easily with these drivers. My understanding of the GPU vendor world is that generic Linux GPU support is way below the priority given to Android. This isn't to say that there couldn't be some alignment/commonality for a driver in Linux or Android, but Android will get a lot more testing and biz focus. The Wayland and 'open software community' GPU advocates either have not considered this, don't care or hope that GPU stack implementations will move towards their world rather than Android's. Although ironically the licensing for Wayland and libdrm and whatnot are MIT rather than GPL like Mir.
- forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
  GPU acceleration. The free drivers like Nouveau are way behind what they should be. The reason is that there is no commercial interest for companies to create good GPU drivers on desktop linux. Nvidia is not contributing to wayland and so on. In Android, there is. So the situation is this, iOS already has fantastic GPU support, Windows 8 and Android have too. Desktop Linux is behind the curve. You can't make so many things in the desktop because you can't assert GPU accel. So Mark wants to change that with with what already exist.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    How does Mir have better Nvidia support than Wayland?
    - forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
      Android devices already provide with drivers capable of real time zoom effects or any other capability of the device, measured in OpenGL extensions support. They are not that well documented, but they work ok, because if not, the manufacturer does not sell the device. Mir inherits Android graphic system on purpose. In wayland you need Open drivers, like Nouveau which are very slow as the power management is not complete, or they are not sure enough to activate it(it could toast thousands of cards): http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ The life of those developers is hard, all day fixing bugs, and new bugs appear like it is never going to finish(you don't see the light at the end of the tunnel).
      - bkor 13y ago
        Wayland had Android driver support before Mir. Mir actually uses the same thing as wayland (libhybris or something).
      - w0utert 13y ago
        I don't get it, why does Wayland require Nouveau? The closed-source NVidia drivers are feature-compatible with their closed-source Windows drivers, so why would Wayland (or MIR, for that matter) be limited by them? What more do Wayland or MIR need besides shaders and OpenCL? Or is all of this just because the Wayland and MIR developers only want to use open-source drivers?
- owaislone 13y ago
  Control over a critical part of the stack. Canonical can bend Mir whichever way they want without waiting for the upstream to implement something or accept patches or wait for releases that contain features Unity doesn't need. They implement only what they want, how they want (full-blown automated testing) and get to dictate the direction of the display server which is critical for Ubuntu across devices. Upstreams don't always share the vision and often do things that don't align well with the distro. Remember Nautilus changes a couple of cycles back. I'm not saying Gnome devs did anything wrong with Nautilus, but pointing out how it was a big pain for Ubuntu developers/users. I believe you have to control all the critical parts of your product and not live on the mercy of upstreams. Canonical is not here to donate resources to help make your linux ecosystem better. That is only a side-effect of it being a member of that ecosystem. Canonical's primary goal is to create a awesome product that can disrupt multiple markets so I would say it makes perfect sense for Mir to exist.
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago
  What is the point of Chrome existing? I get that Chrome added a JIT javascript compiler, but hasn't Firefox since added that in response? Are there any other advantages besides satiating their "not invented here" problem?
  - ergo14 13y ago
    As I understand the situation: Mir borrowed code from wayland and this comparision does not make too much sense in light of that. Most likely some patches to wayland would be enough to get what they wanted - instead now we have more fragmentation.
    - akmiller 13y ago
      But the same comparison could be made about Chrome and Chromium, no?
      - nsmartt 13y ago
        No. Google supports Chromium, and Chrome has proprietary additions. I do wish Chrome didn't exist, but I'm not convinced that this comparison works.
      - ergo14 13y ago
        But chromium and chrome do not lead to duplication of efforts: Chrome is basicly Chromium + addons - and chrome devs contribute to chromium - they supplement eachother.
        RyanMcGreal 13y ago
        Chromium/Chrome are based on Webkit (forked into Blink since Chrome 27), which in turn is based on KHTML/KJS. Chrome was built in large part by former Mozilla engineers, and Mozilla Firefox itself was built based on the browser engine open-sourced by Netscape as its swan-song gift to the open web.
  - isaacaggrey 13y ago
comex 13y ago
Original blog post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1269 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1269
o0-0o 13y ago
w-o-w
quink 13y ago
> Shuttleworth said he has been running Mir on his own laptop, an "all-Intel" Dell XPS, for two weeks, and that barring a few minor glitches, the system feels smoother than it did before. Well... yes.
- Pengwin 13y ago
  >"all-Intel" I wonder how well Nvidia/AMD graphics will work with Mir, considering they closed source and have left a lot to be desired in terms of performance and compatibility.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    AMD has very good free drivers, good for anything but "hardcore" linux gaming (whatever that is). Nvidia similarly has good free drivers, though those unlike the AMD drivers are reverse engineered. Still works fine from what I understand. Mir just uses KMS like Wayland right? It should work just fine unless you want to run Crysis with WINE or something.
    - javanix 13y ago
      To anyone not familiar with this, jlgreco is referring to open-source drivers - both AMD and nVidia provide closed-source driver binaries that tend to outperform their open-source counterparts. nVidia and AMD's closed-source drivers have advanced noticeably since Valve released the Steam for Linux client.
      - pekk 13y ago
        Only for values of "outperform" which are selective in which frame rates they measure, and take absolutely no account of power consumption on laptops. I wish it weren't so, and it's nobody's fault but the vendors', but the open source drivers are not clearly better in every way
        jlgreco 13y ago
stephen 13y ago
Wow. For all the years Linux has been stuck with X, I'm impressed they've essentially replaced it in <6 months. (Disclaimer: IANAE)
- mpyne 13y ago
  Well the work done to prep for moving to Wayland has probably helped a lot for moving to any other not-X, I would imagine. E.g. Qt has a lot better abstraction capabilities now than it did for Qt 3.
  - jonhohle 13y ago
    > Qt has a lot better abstraction capabilities > now than it did for Qt 3 Qt has run on not-X since the beginning. It's always been available for Windows, and has had (suboptimal) OS X support for over a decade.
    - gcr 13y ago
      GTK+ has also worked fine on Windows for ages with support for native Windows widgets.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      I'm well aware of where Qt has (and has not) been able to run. What I'm saying is that it's a lot easier to make new ports now than it was back then. This was mostly driven by Nokia's requirements, but it's still useful in the context of making a version that would run on Mir.
- hollerith 13y ago
  In Ubuntu 13.10, Mir will be inserted between X and the graphics drivers (roughly speaking). Although that is one step toward eventually eliminating the need for X, X will still be needed (e.g., to run Chromium or Firefox) in Ubuntu 13.10. I.e., the title of this story, "Ubuntu 13.10 to ship with Mir instead of X," (emphasis mine) is false.
  - 13y ago
benmccann 13y ago
Any idea whether the NX remote desktop will still work with Mir?
- tmzt 13y ago
  It will likely continue to work with Xmir, though I would think NX/FreeNX would need changes to work with Mir directly. (Same applies to Wayland.)
zalew 13y ago
but http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/06/lubuntu-kubuntu-decide-against-mir-switch http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/06/lubuntu-kubuntu-decide-ag...
ot 13y ago
I found this video (made in May) of Unity Next running on Mir on a Retina MBP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9AzRxsnfTE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9AzRxsnfTE It does look snappy, compared to X11... EDIT: this one is more recent and taken with screen capture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcFkJtCJgQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcFkJtCJgQ
- zobzu 13y ago
  http://youtu.be/CwQfYG8Bm6U?t=32s http://youtu.be/CwQfYG8Bm6U?t=32s (wayland, weston, multiple GL clients on top of the GL rendered desktop) http://youtu.be/eWfxJWA0Rwg?t=3m28s http://youtu.be/eWfxJWA0Rwg?t=3m28s DirectFB on crappy tablet hardware, putting stuff to shame like it's BeOS all over again.
bmasci 13y ago
Does Mir's existence have anything to do with Wayland's slow development? I read (source unavailable, sorry) that Canonical grew frustrated with Wayland's crawl and decided to make their own. Again, not sure if this is the case.
- zobzu 13y ago
  Wayland requires stuff like KDE (QT) and Gnome (GTK) to be ported to it to be useful.. or to bring their own stuff. Qt5 now works on Wayland - and KDE has a release coming up (the dev code already works on Wayland)
  - bkor 13y ago
    When Mir was announed, Wayland was already past 1.0. About 60% of the GNOME applications currently run under Wayland. See https://live.gnome.org/Wayland/Applications https://live.gnome.org/Wayland/Applications. Note that Mir requires the exact same stuff. Just that nobody posted a patch to add such support. It is all distro specific.
    - mercurial 13y ago
      Not going to be integrated in upstream KDE in any case, see [1]. I don't think Gnome devs are particularly sanguine about it either. As for me, I'm waiting for a hypothetical WLMonad. 1: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu/ http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu...
- mseepgood 13y ago
  If that were the case Canonical could have participated in the development in order to help.
  - pekk 13y ago
    mythical man-month.
- qznc 13y ago
frozenport 13y ago
Sloppy Sasquatch 13.10! They will break a lot of compatibility work, specifically in terms of hardware acceleration, meaning that a Linux user with a $500 GeForce 780 will be using software rendering.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago
  They're running it in XMir. Which has it's own implications/possibilities.
- lvillani 13y ago
  (Hopefully) they won't. They said that having either fglrx or nVidia's binary blob installed would cause the system to fall back to plain X.org.
akandiah 13y ago
The question of need aside, how will this work with the binary drivers provided by NVidia and AMD?
zobzu 13y ago
Ubuntu is infected by the NIH syndrome. Mir, upstart, Unity, you name it.
- pekk 13y ago
  Gnome 3 has its own NIH syndrome. XFCE was NIH because otherw desktops existed. LXDE was NIH because other desktops existed. Almost every new thing back to the beginning of time was NIH because there was something approximately similar before. There is truly nothing new under the sun. So what?
  - lmm 13y ago
    So it's better to support KDE, which seems to have a far lower drama-quotient and is much more willing to adopt GNOME technology than vice-versa.
  - zobzu 13y ago
    Actually, what I really mean by that is that Ubuntu leverage their control over users to enforce their pov on software. Nothing much new under the sun tho. Doesn't make statement invalid.
- rlpb 13y ago
  > upstart No. upstart existed before systemd, and was the first of its kind. Unity exists because GNOME took a different direction from Ubuntu's vision of what the desktop should look like (just look at the number of people who complain about GNOME 3 removing features). Mir developers have justified their position technically. I understand that their technical position is refuted by Wayland proponents. But if you don't understand the technical arguments yourself, I don't think you can justifiably comment, since there's clearly politics involved in the claims and rebuttals made. If anything, Ubuntu is infected with a Just Get It Done syndrome. I don't think that's a bad thing. Show me a real world distro with significant user share that ships Wayland, and does it better than Ubuntu. Without that you have no argument.
  - bkor 13y ago
xahrepap 13y ago
"the multimillionaire and erstwhile astronaut wrote" It seems like whenever someone writes about Shuttleworth, they feel the need to point out he's a multimillionaire or something similar. More so than most other people they write about. To me, it just sounds like poor writing. Trying to "fluff" things up a bit.
- jfoster 13y ago
  I've actually thought the opposite. I'm surprised that his personal story doesn't get talked about more in the press. He's a guy who started a company, made a huge amount of money, became the first South African in space, and now has a company that is trying to build an operating system to dethrone Windows and OSX.
jimmaswell 13y ago
How is this going to hold up for using windows over the network? I liked that feature of X.
- Tyr42 13y ago
  If it's anything like Wayland, it should be like VNC.
- sce 13y ago
  Check out the demo from last year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zwnqKysfI#t=4314s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zwnqKysfI#t=4314s (Video should start at ca. 1:12:00).
themrdarknezz 13y ago
People here highly underestimate the effect linux will have on society if it actually gets ANY marketshare.
- antocv 13y ago
  Dont you mean free software? Linux already has a great marketshare - Android - but no perceptible effect on society, most people dont still know what Linux is, and certainly not what freedom in software is about. Which sucks, but thats the way it is, and once that changes, then we're in for great times.
- rimantas 13y ago
  Would you mind to explain more? Linux already got market share in the form of Android, what effect it has on society (as opossed to other OSes)?
mathnode 13y ago
Everyone seems to have forgotten where OpenGL came from when they whine about mir. Asshats. I am very much looking forward to mir.

164 points by tmzt 13y ago

What is the point of Mir existing? I get that Mir added support for Android GPU drivers, but hasn't Wayland since added that in response? Are there any other advantages besides satiating their "not invented here" problem?

timpattinson 13y ago
This blog seems to explain some of the reasoning (http://blog.cooperteam.net/ http://blog.cooperteam.net/), but IMO I don't think Mir is worth the fragmentation it will create.
- D9u 13y ago
  That fragmentation is exactly why I chose FreeBSD nearly a year ago. As the old adage goes: FreeBSD is what you get when Unix developers get together and create a Unix-like system for the PC platform. Linux is what you get when PC developers get together and create a Unix-like system for PC.
  - jbrechtel 13y ago
    Are you using FreeBSD on a laptop?
    - 3825 13y ago
      Are you referring to this xkcd? http://xkcd.com/349/ http://xkcd.com/349/
      - hillbillyjack 13y ago
        I doubt he is, it has been hard to get FreeBSD working on any laptop that isn't specifically supported by someone. You can see many non-working things here: http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/ http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/ from no sound to can't boot. Power management is also notoriously bad so you need your laptop to be plugged in. It is reminiscent of Linux a few years ago when everyone with brand new laptops tried to install it. FreeBSD is still fine on desktop systems and even works quite well for a desktop in some cases, but Linux is just so big at this point that it supports more things, while FreeBSD has always seemed more server oriented.
        D9u 13y ago
        FreeBSD is still fine on desktop systems and even works quite well for a desktop in some cases, but Linux is just so big at this point that it supports more things, while FreeBSD has always seemed more server oriented. Apparently you have not tried FreeBSD on an Acer Aspire One netbook, because if you did you would realize that your last paragraph is outdated by at least 3 minor version iterations. I first tried PC-BSD 8.x in 2009, and with KDE as the default DE it unusably slow, but when I tried FreeBSD 8.x last year I was pleasantly suprised with how well the system ran on my little netbook. Then, when I upgraded to 9.0 I realized that I had finally found what I had been searching for all these years. Now, with 9.1 the system is even better.
        synchronise 13y ago
        I used to run a PC-BSD system and it pretty much worked out of the box, that is until I got an AMD 6* series video card but I hear the radeon driver is being developed and very close to being integrated into FreeBSD 10 and backported to 9. Yes, FreeBSD lacks some features that Linux has, but it's still being developed and it has its uses outside of the server market too. For example, Sony is reportedly using it as the core OS for the new PS4 and there's a project that is aiming to create a HUD device which is also based on FreeBSD, http://hmdviking.blogspot.jp/ http://hmdviking.blogspot.jp/
        asveikau 13y ago
        A few years ago I ran OpenBSD on a Thinkpad. Worked well. It was a lot like Linux used to be in the late 90s though... I tried to put it on a few other machines with less success.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - jbrechtel 13y ago
        Haha, no. I was just curious about the feasibility these days of FreeBSD on a laptop.
    - D9u 13y ago
      I've been running FreeBSD on my netbook since last autumn and it's more responsive, and noticeably faster than #!, which I tried out last month. (I just reinstalled FBSD last night) Crunchbang just doesn't compare as far as speed goes. I tested both OS' with Xfce4.1, as well as no DE with dwm & dmenu. In each case FreeBSD blows crunchbang away, and this is on an Intel Atom N270 with 1 GB RAM. The only thing #! has going for it is ease of setup, but FreeBSD isn't that hard to setup and use, and all questions I've had are easily answered by reading the FreeBSD Handbook. Some will decry FBSD's support for suspend/hibernate, but since I never use those features it's a non issue for me. That said, I do believe that suspend, etc, is working for some laptops, although YMMV.
      - pyre 13y ago
        | Some will decry FBSD's support for | suspend/hibernate, but since I never | use those features it's a non issue for me. This is how most people use a laptop. While that may be perfectly fine for you, that doesn't work for a lot of people.
        D9u 13y ago
        A 12 cell battery lasts a long time on this little netbook. But you're right, I'm not most people.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        How do you pack up your laptop and bring it somewhere else without it melting down in the bag? Just make sure nothing is burning CPU, pack it up, and hope for the best?
        hobs 13y ago
        I assume he uses the shut down feature.
        D9u 13y ago
        Of course. Why does the netbook have to stay running if I'm not using it? Sometimes the simplest things are so abstruse to some of us.
  - zanny 13y ago
    So don't take consideration for Dragonflybsd, OpenBSD, or the biggest elephant in the bsd fork room, OSX. FOSS will fragment because people have different opinions and are passionate about the choices they make in the software to create and use. There is no alternative, because in free software the developer has last say. There is no school of "the one way" of how to do anything in foss, the only possible proxy being the popularity of the software created.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Don't forget NetBSD.
  - gwu78 13y ago
    I like that old adage. I actually had never heard it. I think BSD's success with i386 has brought the stark pragmatism of the "server" to the PC. The dream of BSDI. The reliability, robustness and the uniformity. Maybe BSD UNIX is not as "fun" as MS and Apple, but it _works_ the best. Relatively minimal bloat. And things can be removed relatively easily. Getting small is not frowned upon or ignored as a worthy objective. "The hero is the negative coder." (credit: Doug McIlroy, one of the original UNIX developers) Linux OTOH (a horde of wannabe kernel hackers and a gazillion idiosyncratic GNU programs) has brought the chaos of the PC[1] to the idea of "UNIX". There is bloat and endless tweaking around every corner. The vigilance and skill it takes to make your Linux small and simple and actually keep it that way is, IME, quite the burden. The respect for the user also differs. Man pages? I guess the assumption is we'll just read the code when we have a question. But then there's also an expectation we'll use binary packages. Linux just makes my head spin. I'm just not smart enough to use it. I wish I was... because they have better hardware support. Based on what I've seen, I doubt many a Linux developer would think "The hero is the negative coder." Linux just keeps growing and becoming more complex and unwieldy. And so by comparison, IMO, Linux less embodies the idea of UNIX than BSD. 1. The Windows experience of constantly searching for some non-MS program to do some task that base Windows itself can't even begin to handle... and you end up with an ad hoc mess of programs that barely do what you need, and most of them poorly written by who knows who.
    - Ologn 13y ago
      I had an appreciation for FreeBSD. They were smart about some things. Especially circa 1996 era. It was an easy install. Pop in a 3.5" disk and do a network install. It had drivers and automagic support for obscure ethernet cards which Linux did not support at that time. It even had an easy modem install. When I needed a small server quick I'd buy a PC from a store, pop a disk in it and network install FreeBSD. Get up a DNS, mail or web server in no time. Making the install process easy can help an OS get out there a lot. The servers were sturdy and good too. A nice ports system for applications - better than dpkg or rpm at the time. It just worked. The install itself was a thing of beauty - no hassles. FreeBSD 1996 beats Gentoo 2013 in that department. As far as bloat, some BSDs are more elegant, but I do not think Linux is that bloated. It is small enough to succeed on embedded systems and Androids. The device driver section is bloated, but the core system is not as bad. Yes, Ubuntu is not small and simple, but Debian is if you want it to be.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I've dropped Fedora and switched to Debian stable in anticipation of avoiding Wayland/Mir for as many years as possible. I'm not worried about fragmentation, I'm just tired of being an early adopter.
    - ludoo 13y ago
      +1
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      I must be missing something. My understanding is that they implement the X protocol via a wrapper layer. Aside from a display manager/compositor, what is going to fragment?
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Well now there is Mir, Wayland, and X, instead of just X. Just right there you now have three codebases instead of one, so that is fragmentation in itself. Is it harmful fragmentation? I think that remains to be seen. I'm not worried about fragmentation though. My position is that currently X "Just Works" for me and I am not willing to sacrifice this stability so that I can test out the pet projects of a bunch of Red Hat and Canonical employees. I figure I have at least 3 years, hopefully 5, before I will be forced to switch. (3 years left on wheezy, and hopefully 2 more years with jessie assuming X is still the default and viable). 3-5 years to let them work out all of the kinks? Yes please, I'll take that. The dust sure as hell better be settled by 2018.
        bkor 13y ago
        A lot of the Wayland developers are X developers. It basically is X12, just that calling it X results in a lot of unneeded steps (loads of people will have a say into the spec, etc). Daniel Stone explained this in a video.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Whatever it is, I want nothing to do with it until everyone else has had and solved the problems.
- synchronise 13y ago
  Every FOSS project has the possibility of creating fragmentation, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Greater software selection allows more choice and offers a better environment for competition. Some will win over others, some will find a niche market to cater, and others will be in continual completion with each other with an almost split marketshare. And while you may feel as though Mir's only aim is to fragment the Linux community, keep in mind that Ubuntu will be using QML extensively and that will be compatible with Wayland, and through the use of libhybris both Mir and Wayland can target the same display driver.
  - ewzimm 13y ago
    Thank you. I am tired of people telling developers to stop making things, especially other developers. This is how evolution works. You have to try multiple approaches and see what works. If you have the money and developers to scratch an itch the way you want to, do it. If it works out, everyone benefits. If it doesn't work, everyone benefits by learning what went wrong. Those advocating that everyone pick one standard and stick to it are missing the point of distributed development.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      The old guys here know how the UNIX wars ended up. Supporting the idea of the jour has development costs.
      - jessaustin 13y ago
        ...how the UNIX wars ended up. I'm sorry, how was that? My recollection seems to be that they all got stale and overpriced, and then GNU/Linux ate their lunch.
        pjmlp 13y ago
        It ended up with fragmentation everywhere, code full of #ifdef spaghetti to cater for all UNIX variants that one needs to support and increased development costs.
- anonymous 13y ago
  I'm thinking that before too long there will be WayMir and MirLand shims to let you run wayland-only programs on mir and vice-versa. Then you can run Unity in Mir in XMir through MirLand on Wayland on XWayland on WayMir on Mir on Mir (the international space station).
  - tudborg 13y ago
    did you just refer to ISS as Mir? Really?
    - akiselev 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir
- qznc 13y ago
  Fragmentation has a cost, because higher levels (Qt,Gtk,etc in this case) must use portability layers. However, staying in one project also has costs: much more discussion and politics.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Both Qt and Gtk has long had explicit support for different backends. Whether or not the user uses an X backend or a Wayland backend or a Mir backend should have minimal impact.
    - bkor 13y ago
      In practice, Gtk+ will have to deprecate a few things to better support Wayland. See https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/GTK%2B https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/GTK%2B and https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/Gaps https://wiki.gnome.org/Wayland/Gaps. Mir and Wayland seem to be pretty related though. Same gaps that Wayland has (needing development time) also are with Mir AFAIK. So once fixed for Wayland, Mir will have it easy :P Note that real Mir support is only planned for 14.10. At the moment it is just XMir, which is totally different from the what is going on with Wayland (goal is native, this is way more difficult). I have seen the development that is needed to get Wayland really working, Mir seems way behind on this though they probably can copy what was done for Wayland and pretend they did it :P
- rbanffy 13y ago
  > I don't think Mir is worth the fragmentation it will create "Fragmentation" is another name for "diversity". Diversity and selection are key factors for healthy evolution and a key advantage of open-source.
  - laumars 13y ago
    Some things are better to be standardised than diversified. eg networking protocols and display managers.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      AFAIK, a program written for X will run unmodified on an Ubuntu box running Mir.
      - laumars 13y ago
        Not exactly. X can run atop of Mir, but then you're adding additional bloat to what is already a rather bloated distro of Linux.
wmf 13y ago
Wayland doesn't use TDD.
JoshTriplett 13y ago
Mir heavily emulates Android's SurfaceFlinger design, and Canonical claims it'll be a better fit for Ubuntu for smartphones. Highly debatable whether that'll actually hold true. In any case, there's no fundamental design flaw in Wayland; this just seems like a common case of NIH.
- colanderman 13y ago
  there's no fundamental design flaw in Wayland Except that window management is tightly coupled to display management. The Mir developers seem to at least seem to care about software modularity.
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    > window management is tightly coupled to display management. Yes, it is, both in general and in Wayland. Specifically, what would once have been called just a window manager now needs to be a compositing manager, managing window contents and compositing them onto the screen. That compositing manager also needs to handle input, since input depends on where, how, and if windows are rendered. And once you're handling all of that, there's nothing useful left that corresponds to an X server other than graphics memory buffer management, which is the kernel's job these days. Wayland handles software modularity by providing a library for use by prospective compositing managers. Moving the compositing manager into a separate process from the thing actually doing the rendering does not add a useful form of modularity.
    - colanderman 13y ago
      Yes, it is, both in general Citation? X11 window managers are decoupled from the rest of X and the OS by well-specified protocols. That compositing manager also needs to handle input Oh yes, I forgot how Wayland couples the WM to the OS as well. Wayland handles software modularity by providing a library for use by prospective compositing managers. Moving the compositing manager into a separate process from the thing actually doing the rendering does not add a useful form of modularity. 1) Can you point me to an API specification for Wayland compositor libraries? If not, it's not decoupled. 2) Can one switch window managers without restarting the compositor (and thus losing window state) with Wayland? If not, it's missing a "useful form of modularity" provided by X11.
kklimonda 13y ago
There is a good link below with some technical rationale (I think the most important part, at least according to Canonical developers, is "Server Allocated Buffers in Mir"), but I'm actually wondering - has Wayland officially added the support for working on the Android graphics stack? There has been at least two proof-of-concept projects, but I don't see either of them being actually committed to the Wayland repository. Given that Canonical is working against the clock it's not that surprising that they are going with their own solution - they obviously believe that they can get it working faster.
- teho 13y ago
  The lead developer of libhybris (the project that makes it possible to run Android drivers on GNU/Linux and also what Canonical uses with Mir) is working on support for Android drivers on Wayland. http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-and... http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-and...
- bkor 13y ago
  That was working on Wayland before it was working on Mir.
edderly 13y ago
Realpolitik. Although Wayland 'could' support Android based/styled graphics drivers Mir should be able to work easily with these drivers. My understanding of the GPU vendor world is that generic Linux GPU support is way below the priority given to Android. This isn't to say that there couldn't be some alignment/commonality for a driver in Linux or Android, but Android will get a lot more testing and biz focus. The Wayland and 'open software community' GPU advocates either have not considered this, don't care or hope that GPU stack implementations will move towards their world rather than Android's. Although ironically the licensing for Wayland and libdrm and whatnot are MIT rather than GPL like Mir.
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
GPU acceleration. The free drivers like Nouveau are way behind what they should be. The reason is that there is no commercial interest for companies to create good GPU drivers on desktop linux. Nvidia is not contributing to wayland and so on. In Android, there is. So the situation is this, iOS already has fantastic GPU support, Windows 8 and Android have too. Desktop Linux is behind the curve. You can't make so many things in the desktop because you can't assert GPU accel. So Mark wants to change that with with what already exist.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  How does Mir have better Nvidia support than Wayland?
  - forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
    Android devices already provide with drivers capable of real time zoom effects or any other capability of the device, measured in OpenGL extensions support. They are not that well documented, but they work ok, because if not, the manufacturer does not sell the device. Mir inherits Android graphic system on purpose. In wayland you need Open drivers, like Nouveau which are very slow as the power management is not complete, or they are not sure enough to activate it(it could toast thousands of cards): http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ The life of those developers is hard, all day fixing bugs, and new bugs appear like it is never going to finish(you don't see the light at the end of the tunnel).
    - bkor 13y ago
      Wayland had Android driver support before Mir. Mir actually uses the same thing as wayland (libhybris or something).
    - w0utert 13y ago
      I don't get it, why does Wayland require Nouveau? The closed-source NVidia drivers are feature-compatible with their closed-source Windows drivers, so why would Wayland (or MIR, for that matter) be limited by them? What more do Wayland or MIR need besides shaders and OpenCL? Or is all of this just because the Wayland and MIR developers only want to use open-source drivers?
owaislone 13y ago
Control over a critical part of the stack. Canonical can bend Mir whichever way they want without waiting for the upstream to implement something or accept patches or wait for releases that contain features Unity doesn't need. They implement only what they want, how they want (full-blown automated testing) and get to dictate the direction of the display server which is critical for Ubuntu across devices. Upstreams don't always share the vision and often do things that don't align well with the distro. Remember Nautilus changes a couple of cycles back. I'm not saying Gnome devs did anything wrong with Nautilus, but pointing out how it was a big pain for Ubuntu developers/users. I believe you have to control all the critical parts of your product and not live on the mercy of upstreams. Canonical is not here to donate resources to help make your linux ecosystem better. That is only a side-effect of it being a member of that ecosystem. Canonical's primary goal is to create a awesome product that can disrupt multiple markets so I would say it makes perfect sense for Mir to exist.
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
What is the point of Chrome existing? I get that Chrome added a JIT javascript compiler, but hasn't Firefox since added that in response? Are there any other advantages besides satiating their "not invented here" problem?
- ergo14 13y ago
  As I understand the situation: Mir borrowed code from wayland and this comparision does not make too much sense in light of that. Most likely some patches to wayland would be enough to get what they wanted - instead now we have more fragmentation.
  - akmiller 13y ago
    But the same comparison could be made about Chrome and Chromium, no?
    - nsmartt 13y ago
      No. Google supports Chromium, and Chrome has proprietary additions. I do wish Chrome didn't exist, but I'm not convinced that this comparison works.
    - ergo14 13y ago
      But chromium and chrome do not lead to duplication of efforts: Chrome is basicly Chromium + addons - and chrome devs contribute to chromium - they supplement eachother.
      - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
        Chromium/Chrome are based on Webkit (forked into Blink since Chrome 27), which in turn is based on KHTML/KJS. Chrome was built in large part by former Mozilla engineers, and Mozilla Firefox itself was built based on the browser engine open-sourced by Netscape as its swan-song gift to the open web.
- isaacaggrey 13y ago

comex 13y ago

Original blog post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1269 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1269

o0-0o 13y ago

w-o-w

quink 13y ago

> Shuttleworth said he has been running Mir on his own laptop, an "all-Intel" Dell XPS, for two weeks, and that barring a few minor glitches, the system feels smoother than it did before. Well... yes.

Pengwin 13y ago
>"all-Intel" I wonder how well Nvidia/AMD graphics will work with Mir, considering they closed source and have left a lot to be desired in terms of performance and compatibility.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  AMD has very good free drivers, good for anything but "hardcore" linux gaming (whatever that is). Nvidia similarly has good free drivers, though those unlike the AMD drivers are reverse engineered. Still works fine from what I understand. Mir just uses KMS like Wayland right? It should work just fine unless you want to run Crysis with WINE or something.
  - javanix 13y ago
    To anyone not familiar with this, jlgreco is referring to open-source drivers - both AMD and nVidia provide closed-source driver binaries that tend to outperform their open-source counterparts. nVidia and AMD's closed-source drivers have advanced noticeably since Valve released the Steam for Linux client.
    - pekk 13y ago
      Only for values of "outperform" which are selective in which frame rates they measure, and take absolutely no account of power consumption on laptops. I wish it weren't so, and it's nobody's fault but the vendors', but the open source drivers are not clearly better in every way
      - jlgreco 13y ago

stephen 13y ago

Wow. For all the years Linux has been stuck with X, I'm impressed they've essentially replaced it in <6 months. (Disclaimer: IANAE)

mpyne 13y ago
Well the work done to prep for moving to Wayland has probably helped a lot for moving to any other not-X, I would imagine. E.g. Qt has a lot better abstraction capabilities now than it did for Qt 3.
- jonhohle 13y ago
  > Qt has a lot better abstraction capabilities > now than it did for Qt 3 Qt has run on not-X since the beginning. It's always been available for Windows, and has had (suboptimal) OS X support for over a decade.
  - gcr 13y ago
    GTK+ has also worked fine on Windows for ages with support for native Windows widgets.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    I'm well aware of where Qt has (and has not) been able to run. What I'm saying is that it's a lot easier to make new ports now than it was back then. This was mostly driven by Nokia's requirements, but it's still useful in the context of making a version that would run on Mir.
hollerith 13y ago
In Ubuntu 13.10, Mir will be inserted between X and the graphics drivers (roughly speaking). Although that is one step toward eventually eliminating the need for X, X will still be needed (e.g., to run Chromium or Firefox) in Ubuntu 13.10. I.e., the title of this story, "Ubuntu 13.10 to ship with Mir instead of X," (emphasis mine) is false.
- 13y ago

benmccann 13y ago

Any idea whether the NX remote desktop will still work with Mir?

tmzt 13y ago
It will likely continue to work with Xmir, though I would think NX/FreeNX would need changes to work with Mir directly. (Same applies to Wayland.)

zalew 13y ago

but http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/06/lubuntu-kubuntu-decide-against-mir-switch http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/06/lubuntu-kubuntu-decide-ag...

ot 13y ago

I found this video (made in May) of Unity Next running on Mir on a Retina MBP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9AzRxsnfTE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9AzRxsnfTE It does look snappy, compared to X11... EDIT: this one is more recent and taken with screen capture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcFkJtCJgQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcFkJtCJgQ

zobzu 13y ago
http://youtu.be/CwQfYG8Bm6U?t=32s http://youtu.be/CwQfYG8Bm6U?t=32s (wayland, weston, multiple GL clients on top of the GL rendered desktop) http://youtu.be/eWfxJWA0Rwg?t=3m28s http://youtu.be/eWfxJWA0Rwg?t=3m28s DirectFB on crappy tablet hardware, putting stuff to shame like it's BeOS all over again.

bmasci 13y ago

Does Mir's existence have anything to do with Wayland's slow development? I read (source unavailable, sorry) that Canonical grew frustrated with Wayland's crawl and decided to make their own. Again, not sure if this is the case.

zobzu 13y ago
Wayland requires stuff like KDE (QT) and Gnome (GTK) to be ported to it to be useful.. or to bring their own stuff. Qt5 now works on Wayland - and KDE has a release coming up (the dev code already works on Wayland)
- bkor 13y ago
  When Mir was announed, Wayland was already past 1.0. About 60% of the GNOME applications currently run under Wayland. See https://live.gnome.org/Wayland/Applications https://live.gnome.org/Wayland/Applications. Note that Mir requires the exact same stuff. Just that nobody posted a patch to add such support. It is all distro specific.
  - mercurial 13y ago
    Not going to be integrated in upstream KDE in any case, see [1]. I don't think Gnome devs are particularly sanguine about it either. As for me, I'm waiting for a hypothetical WLMonad. 1: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu/ http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu...
mseepgood 13y ago
If that were the case Canonical could have participated in the development in order to help.
- pekk 13y ago
  mythical man-month.
qznc 13y ago

frozenport 13y ago

Sloppy Sasquatch 13.10! They will break a lot of compatibility work, specifically in terms of hardware acceleration, meaning that a Linux user with a $500 GeForce 780 will be using software rendering.

drivebyacct2 13y ago
They're running it in XMir. Which has it's own implications/possibilities.
lvillani 13y ago
(Hopefully) they won't. They said that having either fglrx or nVidia's binary blob installed would cause the system to fall back to plain X.org.

akandiah 13y ago

The question of need aside, how will this work with the binary drivers provided by NVidia and AMD?

zobzu 13y ago

Ubuntu is infected by the NIH syndrome. Mir, upstart, Unity, you name it.

pekk 13y ago
Gnome 3 has its own NIH syndrome. XFCE was NIH because otherw desktops existed. LXDE was NIH because other desktops existed. Almost every new thing back to the beginning of time was NIH because there was something approximately similar before. There is truly nothing new under the sun. So what?
- lmm 13y ago
  So it's better to support KDE, which seems to have a far lower drama-quotient and is much more willing to adopt GNOME technology than vice-versa.
- zobzu 13y ago
  Actually, what I really mean by that is that Ubuntu leverage their control over users to enforce their pov on software. Nothing much new under the sun tho. Doesn't make statement invalid.
rlpb 13y ago
> upstart No. upstart existed before systemd, and was the first of its kind. Unity exists because GNOME took a different direction from Ubuntu's vision of what the desktop should look like (just look at the number of people who complain about GNOME 3 removing features). Mir developers have justified their position technically. I understand that their technical position is refuted by Wayland proponents. But if you don't understand the technical arguments yourself, I don't think you can justifiably comment, since there's clearly politics involved in the claims and rebuttals made. If anything, Ubuntu is infected with a Just Get It Done syndrome. I don't think that's a bad thing. Show me a real world distro with significant user share that ships Wayland, and does it better than Ubuntu. Without that you have no argument.
- bkor 13y ago

xahrepap 13y ago

"the multimillionaire and erstwhile astronaut wrote" It seems like whenever someone writes about Shuttleworth, they feel the need to point out he's a multimillionaire or something similar. More so than most other people they write about. To me, it just sounds like poor writing. Trying to "fluff" things up a bit.

jfoster 13y ago
I've actually thought the opposite. I'm surprised that his personal story doesn't get talked about more in the press. He's a guy who started a company, made a huge amount of money, became the first South African in space, and now has a company that is trying to build an operating system to dethrone Windows and OSX.

jimmaswell 13y ago

How is this going to hold up for using windows over the network? I liked that feature of X.

Tyr42 13y ago
If it's anything like Wayland, it should be like VNC.
sce 13y ago
Check out the demo from last year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zwnqKysfI#t=4314s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zwnqKysfI#t=4314s (Video should start at ca. 1:12:00).

themrdarknezz 13y ago

People here highly underestimate the effect linux will have on society if it actually gets ANY marketshare.

antocv 13y ago
Dont you mean free software? Linux already has a great marketshare - Android - but no perceptible effect on society, most people dont still know what Linux is, and certainly not what freedom in software is about. Which sucks, but thats the way it is, and once that changes, then we're in for great times.
rimantas 13y ago
Would you mind to explain more? Linux already got market share in the form of Android, what effect it has on society (as opossed to other OSes)?

mathnode 13y ago

Everyone seems to have forgotten where OpenGL came from when they whine about mir. Asshats. I am very much looking forward to mir.