9 ms·

Intel Says No to Ubuntu's New Display Server

103 points by hanuca 13y ago

hanuca 13y ago
True or false?
- teho 13y ago
  True: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=58a7611ccfda88c7cbcc62b25b787d6b0fa64081&utm_source=anzwix http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/com... Intel is the most active company in Wayland developement too.
devx 13y ago
Maybe this means Canonical will focus more on ARM hardware now, which is kind of the point of Mir anyway - to be a lot more efficient on "lower-end" mobile hardware like ARM chips. Can't say I wouldn't like that to happen.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Or Canonical's packagers will just carry on patching the Intel drivers?
  - mayhew 13y ago
    That works fine because Intel has open source drivers. Not so much if NVIDIA and AMD decide to only support Wayland.
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      True enough. No support for NVIDIA cards at all in current Ubuntu betas. I think even nouveau was falling back to X compatibility but I might have that wrong. It was sloooow
- skylan_q 13y ago
  It would be smart to focus on ARM as a long-term strategy. There is a huge investment and legacy in x86 but if history is right, ARM will eat up x86 from the bottom-up just like x86 did to the other ISA's.
  - zokier 13y ago
    Of course the ARM future is not all that glorious. The open-source friendly ARM vendors are not that common, most ARM GPUs do not have (1st party) opensource graphics drivers.
tinco 13y ago
What an awful move. Note that they are deliberately hurting open source software by restricting contributions for a purely political reason. Obviously it will result in an Ubuntu fork of the intel drivers, which will eventually lead to a situation where the only consequence is a more painful workflow for Ubuntu core contributers and early adopters looking for up to date drivers.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Does not surprise me. Many guys in FOSS tend to like Intel, but not all Intel departments are FOSS friendly. Even the graphics division, tends to put more resources into DirectX tooling and processors like the PowerVR family, than what they contribute to X.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - thomasjames 13y ago
    This is not about FOSS, it is about one man's vision to circumvent the mainstream developer community. Ubuntu chose to make the transition from pre-configuring Debian and making compiz themes for Gnome to trying its hand at systems-level programming. It would be somewhat self-assured of them to assume that all hardware vendors, who are already heavily invested in Linux, as a platform, would necessarily pick up the slack, especially when those investments did not foresee a move like Mir.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      I don't say otherwise, just that Intel as a company is a corporation like any other, with contributions to FOSS also driven by internal politics.
      - kbuck 13y ago
        I don't think it's entirely a corporate move here. Free software contributions aren't infinite; if you have $N developers working on integrating support for display servers, then it's simple math that having to support two display servers means that you'll have $N/2 developers working on each, and will therefore get half the work done (and, since they'll probably still have to support X11 for a while, make that $N/3). Ubuntu selfishly forked Mir instead of choosing to try to use Wayland (especially when they had originally committed to using Wayland[1]), so the burden is on them here. It also doesn't help that Canonical employees were using the inclusion of XMir support as political fodder[2]. [1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 [2] https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112 https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112
slurry 13y ago
According to Phornoix, Chris Wilson of Intel wrote this in a Git commit: We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY Phoronix's link to said commit does not work, so it is hard to infer context. But I would assume that "the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel.
- krschultz 13y ago
  ""the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel." I absolutely blame Intel. Whatever you think about Ubuntu's decision to make their own X server, it is childish to not include working patches for purely political reasons. It's not like Ubuntu is asking Intel to do their work for them. So Canonical got railed for not contributing upstream, and they try to contribute upstream they get everyone blaming them again? That's ridiculous.
  - ealexhudson 13y ago
    Most upstreams will generally accept responsibility for keeping code working - just having it "merged" often means then handling bug reports, testing, etc. If the Intel people don't want to maintain specialized Ubuntu-only environments just to test the Mir codepaths, that's kind of their call. It probably also didn't help that Canonical employees were using it as a political football to boot other GPU vendors, e.g. https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112 https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112 It was Canonical's decision to fork, if they have to bear the costs of the fork then so be it.
    - krschultz 13y ago
      The old classic argument around why Linux doesn't have a rigid internal API comes to mind (http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html). Maybe there are commonalities between supporting Mir and Wayland that would allow Intel to create a more universal piece of software? If Canonical does the work to make the driver universal, wouldn't the whole community benefit? I'm not a big fan of letting politics get in the way of engineering, and this smells of the fact that Intel is trying to battle ARM in a proxy war, with FOSS as collateral damage.
Havoc 13y ago
Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive? Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.
- asveikau 13y ago
  I do not know this code but the diff, posted elsewhere in this thread, looks more than trivial to me. Such changes tend to have maintenance cost. If the original authors don't care about the functionality and aren't testing it, it's probably not worth keeping, as they may go through great pains to leave it in and still end up breaking it frequently.
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  > Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive? Something like this is actually quite common, and more or less necessary. In proprietary software development, there is typically some hierarchical authority that makes design decisions. You might debate for a while, but eventually someone is going to come up with a decision of how things are going to be done. In FOSS, no such central authority exists, so design of inter-related projects is effectively a distributed negotiation. Usually, things are done amicably, everyone is happy to share each other's code, and disputes are handled peacefully. However, every now and then there is a situation where two entities simply cannot agree, and one of them has to put the foot down and say: "No, this is a bad idea, we won't spend the effort helping you do this. If you want it, do it yourself." And since it's all a very public negotiation, making this kind of announcement is just one step up the ladder of escalation from a private email declining a patch. As flames go, it's rather tame. :) > Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason. Intel absolutely can, and has, for hundreds of times over the past few months. At some time you just have to give up on trying to convince the other people and do something useful.
- aristidb 13y ago
  It's not as if Canonical's approach was exactly uncontroversial either. My reaction to the Mir announcement was not exactly that I was overwhelmed by warm fuzzies, to put it that way, because I think they should collaborate on Wayland rather than doing their own thing for something as central as the display server.
sitharus 13y ago
For those interested, this comment is caused by this commit revert: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=0c697aee9b3767be7d1e04e4e4f9d304f23b188a http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/com... So originally the XMir support was merged in, then reverted on instructions from Higher Ups. I can't really blame them, if they make driver changes Intel would have to adapt the XMir code to cope with them.
- csense 13y ago
  What is the reasoning for putting this code in the video driver? The "Theory of Operation" comment in the merged-then-reverted code is insightful. Apparently, the code is supposed to figure out which parts of windows are damaged, and then tell the windowing system to do something about it. IMHO, windows are not a concept that should even exist in the video driver [1]. They should be entirely under control of the windowing system. Which means that figuring out which parts of windows are damaged is logic that should totally reside in the windowing system, having no parts in the video driver. If this code must be in the driver because it needs to access private data/functionality that's not visible outside the driver, then an API to expose those driver internals to the windowing system would be a design that better separates those layers. Reverting this commit seems like a sound technical decision to me. Assuming Intel's decision is politically motivated, and then getting outraged about it, seems counterproductive. [1] Even if this concept has already leaked into the driver for X or other windowing systems, doesn't mean that questionable designs used in old code should be allowed in new code.
  - mbell 13y ago
    Not really informed here but I would venture a guess that 'perfect separation of concerns' causes a performance hit. In the backend web dev world you can usually suck that up by making the load parallelizable across servers, something you don't have the option of doing with code running locally. In other words, 'separation of concerns' is great until you hit a performance bottleneck, as you often do with any resource constrained system.
  - txutxu 13y ago
pcx66 13y ago
This is a totally bullshit way of managing a FOSS project. You should never remove working code from a FOSS project if someone is already maintaining it and that someone represents a major chunk of your users. I hate that Ubuntu guys are moving away from X/Wayland (so suddenly and in a close-is way), but treating them like this indirectly is wrong. We got to play fair with the FOSS eco-system.
- josephlord 13y ago
  Not sure it deserves the down votes you got but I think you are very wrong. If you are running a project you can remove what you want, if someone wants something different enough they can fork it. If you do it early before many people are using it you will get far less complaints than when there are millions of users. Adding code, and features places further requirements and limitations on further changes and any feature added and widely used will become nearly impossible to remove later.
viseztrance 13y ago
Choice is good, but for too long has open source been fighting among itself. I commend Intel for doing this. They're hardly alone after all, they're just joining Kde, Gnome, Enlightenment and all the other open source projects that embraced Wayland.
hippich 13y ago
Political talks aside, it looks all good. Intel will develop code for Wayland (which potentially will be used in all but Ubuntu distros) and Ubuntu will be working on adding patches for XMir on their own since XMir will be used only in Ubuntu. Eventually either XMir will be proven better and more distros adopt it and then it will be more reasonable for Intel spend time on integrating drivers with XMir. No real news here.
chris_wot 13y ago
There is one vendor using Mir. One. I don't blame Intel for not backing it.
- general_failure 13y ago
  And there are zero using Wayland. Zero.
  - mayhew 13y ago
    Ubuntu isn't planning to use Mir until the 14.10 release. [1] GNOME 3.10 will have Wayland support later this month. [2] [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-June/037401.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-June/037... [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/WaylandSupport https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/WaylandSuppor...
  - shuzchen 13y ago
    Wayland packages have been in Fedora since 18 (it's at 19 now and 20 is to drop in under 3 months time). You can already start testing your apps to see how they work in Wayland, and it's on the roadmap to being integrated as the default. Gentoo and Archlinux also appear to have experimental support and plans to switch.
    - dingaling 13y ago
      > Gentoo and Archlinux also appear to have experimental support and plans to switch. Indeed, but the problem with Wayland is that one can't just 'switch' from X. Wayland provides graphics multiplexing; that's it. Possibly mangled analogy: it's like saying we're switching from a LAMP stack to Postgres; it doesn't make sense as a statement.
      - forgottenpass 13y ago
        >the problem with Wayland is that one can't just 'switch' from X. Does switching to a wayland compositor by default and using xwayland for the applications that still can't talk to it not sufficiently address that? At least as practically as is possible when replacing a popular piece of interoperable software with a large user install base?
benologist 13y ago
The site that plagues Google with shitty search results by scraping Github and other websites and removing source links brings us a summary of yesterday's news via a spam account. For extra fuckwittery they even nofollow the source links they steal their news from. Stay classy, Softpedia! https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hanuca https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hanuca https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347244
- meritt 13y ago
  Why don't we simply blacklist Softpedia and other bullshit sites from HN submissions.
jebblue 13y ago
It seems there's similarities between Wayland and Mir: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) "Mir, like Wayland, is built on EGL[6] and utilizes some of the infrastructure originally developed for Wayland[7] such as Mesa’s EGL implementation[6] and Jolla’s libhybris." So why didn't Canonical just use Wayland, I thought that was their plan forward a couple of years ago? Whatever they do I hope they don't screw up Ubuntu 12.04's excellent ability to play Steam based games. EDIT: Read the controversy of the Wiki article, interesting insights.
ausjke 13y ago
I don't know what to say here. I'm still running Ubuntu but the phone-tablet-desktop eat it all strategy got me seriously concerned. Come on, Microsoft can't do that with its deep pocket, neither does Google, you just don't eat more than you can chew, not to mention you have no market share in any of them yet. Focusing on ubuntu server LTS, charging service fees, focusing on cloud platforms, while maintaining a free desktop to keep a wide user base, seems more reasonable to me.
prodigal_erik 13y ago
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec doesn't even consider remoting, and to date Wayland has just punted on it. Is there any way they can both lose? The brief era of only caring about the machine under my desk is coming to an end, and any display system that isn't designed around accommodating latency is going to become a terrible mistake.

103 points by hanuca 13y ago

hanuca 13y ago

True or false?

teho 13y ago
True: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=58a7611ccfda88c7cbcc62b25b787d6b0fa64081&utm_source=anzwix http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/com... Intel is the most active company in Wayland developement too.

devx 13y ago

Maybe this means Canonical will focus more on ARM hardware now, which is kind of the point of Mir anyway - to be a lot more efficient on "lower-end" mobile hardware like ARM chips. Can't say I wouldn't like that to happen.

keithpeter 13y ago
Or Canonical's packagers will just carry on patching the Intel drivers?
- mayhew 13y ago
  That works fine because Intel has open source drivers. Not so much if NVIDIA and AMD decide to only support Wayland.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    True enough. No support for NVIDIA cards at all in current Ubuntu betas. I think even nouveau was falling back to X compatibility but I might have that wrong. It was sloooow
skylan_q 13y ago
It would be smart to focus on ARM as a long-term strategy. There is a huge investment and legacy in x86 but if history is right, ARM will eat up x86 from the bottom-up just like x86 did to the other ISA's.
- zokier 13y ago
  Of course the ARM future is not all that glorious. The open-source friendly ARM vendors are not that common, most ARM GPUs do not have (1st party) opensource graphics drivers.

tinco 13y ago

What an awful move. Note that they are deliberately hurting open source software by restricting contributions for a purely political reason. Obviously it will result in an Ubuntu fork of the intel drivers, which will eventually lead to a situation where the only consequence is a more painful workflow for Ubuntu core contributers and early adopters looking for up to date drivers.

pjmlp 13y ago
Does not surprise me. Many guys in FOSS tend to like Intel, but not all Intel departments are FOSS friendly. Even the graphics division, tends to put more resources into DirectX tooling and processors like the PowerVR family, than what they contribute to X.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- thomasjames 13y ago
  This is not about FOSS, it is about one man's vision to circumvent the mainstream developer community. Ubuntu chose to make the transition from pre-configuring Debian and making compiz themes for Gnome to trying its hand at systems-level programming. It would be somewhat self-assured of them to assume that all hardware vendors, who are already heavily invested in Linux, as a platform, would necessarily pick up the slack, especially when those investments did not foresee a move like Mir.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    I don't say otherwise, just that Intel as a company is a corporation like any other, with contributions to FOSS also driven by internal politics.
    - kbuck 13y ago
      I don't think it's entirely a corporate move here. Free software contributions aren't infinite; if you have $N developers working on integrating support for display servers, then it's simple math that having to support two display servers means that you'll have $N/2 developers working on each, and will therefore get half the work done (and, since they'll probably still have to support X11 for a while, make that $N/3). Ubuntu selfishly forked Mir instead of choosing to try to use Wayland (especially when they had originally committed to using Wayland[1]), so the burden is on them here. It also doesn't help that Canonical employees were using the inclusion of XMir support as political fodder[2]. [1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 [2] https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112 https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112

slurry 13y ago

According to Phornoix, Chris Wilson of Intel wrote this in a Git commit: We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1NjY Phoronix's link to said commit does not work, so it is hard to infer context. But I would assume that "the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel.

krschultz 13y ago
""the course of action they have chosen" refers to working on Mir in the first place rather than contributing to Wayland. If that's the case, can't say I really blame Intel." I absolutely blame Intel. Whatever you think about Ubuntu's decision to make their own X server, it is childish to not include working patches for purely political reasons. It's not like Ubuntu is asking Intel to do their work for them. So Canonical got railed for not contributing upstream, and they try to contribute upstream they get everyone blaming them again? That's ridiculous.
- ealexhudson 13y ago
  Most upstreams will generally accept responsibility for keeping code working - just having it "merged" often means then handling bug reports, testing, etc. If the Intel people don't want to maintain specialized Ubuntu-only environments just to test the Mir codepaths, that's kind of their call. It probably also didn't help that Canonical employees were using it as a political football to boot other GPU vendors, e.g. https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112 https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112 It was Canonical's decision to fork, if they have to bear the costs of the fork then so be it.
  - krschultz 13y ago
    The old classic argument around why Linux doesn't have a rigid internal API comes to mind (http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html). Maybe there are commonalities between supporting Mir and Wayland that would allow Intel to create a more universal piece of software? If Canonical does the work to make the driver universal, wouldn't the whole community benefit? I'm not a big fan of letting politics get in the way of engineering, and this smells of the fact that Intel is trying to battle ARM in a proxy war, with FOSS as collateral damage.

Havoc 13y ago

Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive? Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason.

asveikau 13y ago
I do not know this code but the diff, posted elsewhere in this thread, looks more than trivial to me. Such changes tend to have maintenance cost. If the original authors don't care about the functionality and aren't testing it, it's probably not worth keeping, as they may go through great pains to leave it in and still end up breaking it frequently.
Tuna-Fish 13y ago
> Why would any party make such a hostile announcement in the FOSS scene? I'm not all that involved in that scene, but surely this approach is counter-productive? Something like this is actually quite common, and more or less necessary. In proprietary software development, there is typically some hierarchical authority that makes design decisions. You might debate for a while, but eventually someone is going to come up with a decision of how things are going to be done. In FOSS, no such central authority exists, so design of inter-related projects is effectively a distributed negotiation. Usually, things are done amicably, everyone is happy to share each other's code, and disputes are handled peacefully. However, every now and then there is a situation where two entities simply cannot agree, and one of them has to put the foot down and say: "No, this is a bad idea, we won't spend the effort helping you do this. If you want it, do it yourself." And since it's all a very public negotiation, making this kind of announcement is just one step up the ladder of escalation from a private email declining a patch. As flames go, it's rather tame. :) > Especially if you can't back it with a sound technical reason. Intel absolutely can, and has, for hundreds of times over the past few months. At some time you just have to give up on trying to convince the other people and do something useful.
aristidb 13y ago
It's not as if Canonical's approach was exactly uncontroversial either. My reaction to the Mir announcement was not exactly that I was overwhelmed by warm fuzzies, to put it that way, because I think they should collaborate on Wayland rather than doing their own thing for something as central as the display server.

sitharus 13y ago

For those interested, this comment is caused by this commit revert: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=0c697aee9b3767be7d1e04e4e4f9d304f23b188a http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/com... So originally the XMir support was merged in, then reverted on instructions from Higher Ups. I can't really blame them, if they make driver changes Intel would have to adapt the XMir code to cope with them.

csense 13y ago
What is the reasoning for putting this code in the video driver? The "Theory of Operation" comment in the merged-then-reverted code is insightful. Apparently, the code is supposed to figure out which parts of windows are damaged, and then tell the windowing system to do something about it. IMHO, windows are not a concept that should even exist in the video driver [1]. They should be entirely under control of the windowing system. Which means that figuring out which parts of windows are damaged is logic that should totally reside in the windowing system, having no parts in the video driver. If this code must be in the driver because it needs to access private data/functionality that's not visible outside the driver, then an API to expose those driver internals to the windowing system would be a design that better separates those layers. Reverting this commit seems like a sound technical decision to me. Assuming Intel's decision is politically motivated, and then getting outraged about it, seems counterproductive. [1] Even if this concept has already leaked into the driver for X or other windowing systems, doesn't mean that questionable designs used in old code should be allowed in new code.
- mbell 13y ago
  Not really informed here but I would venture a guess that 'perfect separation of concerns' causes a performance hit. In the backend web dev world you can usually suck that up by making the load parallelizable across servers, something you don't have the option of doing with code running locally. In other words, 'separation of concerns' is great until you hit a performance bottleneck, as you often do with any resource constrained system.
- txutxu 13y ago

pcx66 13y ago

This is a totally bullshit way of managing a FOSS project. You should never remove working code from a FOSS project if someone is already maintaining it and that someone represents a major chunk of your users. I hate that Ubuntu guys are moving away from X/Wayland (so suddenly and in a close-is way), but treating them like this indirectly is wrong. We got to play fair with the FOSS eco-system.

josephlord 13y ago
Not sure it deserves the down votes you got but I think you are very wrong. If you are running a project you can remove what you want, if someone wants something different enough they can fork it. If you do it early before many people are using it you will get far less complaints than when there are millions of users. Adding code, and features places further requirements and limitations on further changes and any feature added and widely used will become nearly impossible to remove later.

viseztrance 13y ago

Choice is good, but for too long has open source been fighting among itself. I commend Intel for doing this. They're hardly alone after all, they're just joining Kde, Gnome, Enlightenment and all the other open source projects that embraced Wayland.

hippich 13y ago

Political talks aside, it looks all good. Intel will develop code for Wayland (which potentially will be used in all but Ubuntu distros) and Ubuntu will be working on adding patches for XMir on their own since XMir will be used only in Ubuntu. Eventually either XMir will be proven better and more distros adopt it and then it will be more reasonable for Intel spend time on integrating drivers with XMir. No real news here.

chris_wot 13y ago

There is one vendor using Mir. One. I don't blame Intel for not backing it.

general_failure 13y ago
And there are zero using Wayland. Zero.
- mayhew 13y ago
  Ubuntu isn't planning to use Mir until the 14.10 release. [1] GNOME 3.10 will have Wayland support later this month. [2] [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-June/037401.html https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-June/037... [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/WaylandSupport https://wiki.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/WaylandSuppor...
- shuzchen 13y ago
  Wayland packages have been in Fedora since 18 (it's at 19 now and 20 is to drop in under 3 months time). You can already start testing your apps to see how they work in Wayland, and it's on the roadmap to being integrated as the default. Gentoo and Archlinux also appear to have experimental support and plans to switch.
  - dingaling 13y ago
    > Gentoo and Archlinux also appear to have experimental support and plans to switch. Indeed, but the problem with Wayland is that one can't just 'switch' from X. Wayland provides graphics multiplexing; that's it. Possibly mangled analogy: it's like saying we're switching from a LAMP stack to Postgres; it doesn't make sense as a statement.
    - forgottenpass 13y ago
      >the problem with Wayland is that one can't just 'switch' from X. Does switching to a wayland compositor by default and using xwayland for the applications that still can't talk to it not sufficiently address that? At least as practically as is possible when replacing a popular piece of interoperable software with a large user install base?

benologist 13y ago

The site that plagues Google with shitty search results by scraping Github and other websites and removing source links brings us a summary of yesterday's news via a spam account. For extra fuckwittery they even nofollow the source links they steal their news from. Stay classy, Softpedia! https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hanuca https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hanuca https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6347244

meritt 13y ago
Why don't we simply blacklist Softpedia and other bullshit sites from HN submissions.

jebblue 13y ago

It seems there's similarities between Wayland and Mir: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) "Mir, like Wayland, is built on EGL[6] and utilizes some of the infrastructure originally developed for Wayland[7] such as Mesa’s EGL implementation[6] and Jolla’s libhybris." So why didn't Canonical just use Wayland, I thought that was their plan forward a couple of years ago? Whatever they do I hope they don't screw up Ubuntu 12.04's excellent ability to play Steam based games. EDIT: Read the controversy of the Wiki article, interesting insights.

ausjke 13y ago

I don't know what to say here. I'm still running Ubuntu but the phone-tablet-desktop eat it all strategy got me seriously concerned. Come on, Microsoft can't do that with its deep pocket, neither does Google, you just don't eat more than you can chew, not to mention you have no market share in any of them yet. Focusing on ubuntu server LTS, charging service fees, focusing on cloud platforms, while maintaining a free desktop to keep a wide user base, seems more reasonable to me.

prodigal_erik 13y ago

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec doesn't even consider remoting, and to date Wayland has just punted on it. Is there any way they can both lose? The brief era of only caring about the machine under my desk is coming to an end, and any display system that isn't designed around accommodating latency is going to become a terrible mistake.