12 ms·

XMir postponed in Ubuntu

117 points by ovis 13y ago

comex 13y ago
Does Canonical have any coherent explanation for why they are still pressing on with their own incompatible rewrite of a display server when a perfectly good one was already in development?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- acabal 13y ago
  My guess is that they're doing it so they can have control over the pace of development and features. I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity. Mir might be his attempt to control the stack in anticipation of getting burned again. After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of the product. What if he wants feature Z included in the next dev cycle to support cool new mobile hardware? With Wayland, he'd have to play politics with the developers and pray. With Mir, he can just order it. Not to say that I think it's a good decision. In fact I think it's one of the most ruinous decisions for the Linux community that Canonical could have possibly made. Graphics support has been the biggest thorn in Linux's side for years, and dividing the ecosystem at a time when Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable. But I can see the short-sighted business logic behind it.
  - Jasper_ 13y ago
    > I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity. As someone who was there from the beginning, this is false. The hackfest where some of the initial goals of GNOME Shell were planned out in 2008 at Canonical offices. We were wondering why some of the Canonical guys who were listed as RSVPing weren't there... until we went to lunch and saw that they were having their own private meeting. I don't think we'll ever know what was discussed -- perhaps their indicator system. Canonical employees were participating in the Boston hackfests in 2008 and 2009 and we welcomed their presence; they actually had a lot of good ideas which we integrated. I, personally, never had any issues with Canonical's work and I think all of my coworkers would agree. I'm really not sure where this perceived "us vs. them" animosity came from, but I never felt it personally. They're still absolutely welcome to contribute back to GNOME if they want to (and, to be fair, some still do).
    - SEJeff 13y ago
      I was at the Boston summit in 2010 (for the snowy hackfest mainly) and distinctly remember some unpleasant and very public back and forth between (I believe) Jon William McCann and a Canonical employee who was trying to troll shell and was rightfully called out for their foolishness. I got a _distinct_ feeling of us vs them, but that was in 2010.
  - epsylon 13y ago
    > Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable. Valve's announcement is only a few days old. Mir precedes it by months.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    > After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of the product. That's certainly unbiased wording.
- SCdF 13y ago
  No. They want to have control, and they think they are large enough to get away with it. They're probably right.
- jfoster 13y ago
  Canonical's explanation is on this page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec
  - comex 13y ago
    It's a short, vague explanation that, other than a correction for a significant inaccuracy in the original version (which I think demonstrates a serious lack of research!), has had no update since it was originally published several months ago, despite the almost universal criticism of Canonical's reasoning by the community. I don't think this is particularly coherent.
    - walid 13y ago
      It is definitely not vague and seems to be very coherent in their description of features that both X and Wayland are lacking. I'm not a Linux dev but their points seem well justified.
      - contingencies 13y ago
        They have maintainability across a wide number of devices as a requirement. They have low powered devices with existing, third-party, potentially closed source graphics drivers as a requirement. I don't know about anyone else here, but every time I set up a new system I have to waste hours getting X11 and the console resolution working right. Sometimes, they never work right. Add to that modern features like display brightness, backlit keyboards, power management, external monitor outputs, and touchscreen input with gesture support and it's unrealistic for X11 to spread to the vast number of new, lower powered devices with less technical users without some serious further work to standardize and normalize handling of differences. Therefore I am glad, for the nontechnical majority of the world, that someone out there is bothering to try to make a reference open source mechanism for removing these problems so an install doesn't end in crashes with weird kernel boot messages about drm and BIOS upgrades and X configurations and input device drivers... even if I continue to use gentoo myself.
        13y ago
- j_s 13y ago
  Perhaps the ability to re-license for commercial use? http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html > They can relicense Mir (and any other GPLv3 projects they own) under licenses > that keep their hardware partners happy, and they can ship in the phone market
mindstab 13y ago
Good, they aren't going to have a release that is a massive regression (again). I was planning on skipping 13.10 because everything so far said it would have worse performance and more bugs. OTOH it's a bit scary that their release engineering is making big dramatic structural changes in X servers 3-4 weeks before launch. It should be in frozen locked down beta now... The real solution was that XMir never should have been jammed into their release so forceful while obviously so unready in the first place... Still this is better than launching with it anyways, so half marks Canonical. But this is nothing like the rock solid stability you provided in Beta and Alpha last decade.
- Steltek 13y ago
  Why not? It worked for PulseAudio, right? Or how about the upgrade between the last two LTS releases? I can't understand Canonical's downright eagerness to force broken software out the door just to appease their roadmap and rigid release schedule. It's pushed as the newbie friendly distro but behaves more like Gentoo when it's time to upgrade. I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice.
  - Jach 13y ago
    I'm not sure why you're throwing Gentoo under the bus when its upgrade system is completely different. There is no "time to upgrade" because there are no releases to upgrade to -- you just install new versions of the software you happen to use when they come out and you feel like it. My own experiences with keeping my Gentoo systems up-to-date have been considerably more enjoyable than keeping my Ubuntu systems up-to-date. (I can no longer keep my GUI-reliant Ubuntu systems up-to-date because they're still using 10.04 as I refuse to "upgrade" past Gnome2. So it was bye-bye Ubuntu for me for new installs.) I agree with jcastro that Ubuntu Server is good, it's easy. It's a popular choice for Amazon ec2 images. It also represents a different mindset in system administration compared to the classic one that went like "Install CentOS version X and keep it for 5 years, sure the software is old as crap even when version X just came out and we hope we can apply security patches without needing a whole new version that depends on something the package manager can't provide, but it's stable!!!" (Just for fun I googled "centos packages old as crap" and this popped up as the first link. http://scalability.org/?p=6270 http://scalability.org/?p=6270 Notice how it's from two months ago? It's not a new phenomenon either.)
codex 13y ago
Canonical is desperate to differentiate and this make money. However, when all the code is open and free, there is no way to differentiate for the better. It's like selling insurance. Everyone's product is the same.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jared314 13y ago
  A new display server does not differentiate an OS in anyway that would remotely make money. It is more likely they tried to use a technical solution to solve a non-technical problem (display server consensus on an old architecture).
  - rodgerd 13y ago
    A new display server under GPL3 with mandatory CLA would be an excellent way of making money if you got enough leverage that you could start charging hardware vendors if they wanted a private copy so they could avoid disclosing their driver modifications. It's same relicensing model MySQL made money with.
    - lucian1900 13y ago
      Except no one is shopping around for a display server. Lots of people were (and still are) shopping around for a DB.
  - regularfry 13y ago
    Assuming they make money on phones, it is. They can say "Look, mobile app development is just desktop app development! No special environments! Just cross-compile the Exact Same Code(tm)!" or maybe "It's Just Javascript!(tm)" and all of a sudden they've got a ready-made ecosystem of app developers who don't even need to install any new tools other than what they've already got installed on their desktops to provide content for their phones. More content -> more sales -> more money, and they must be absolutely desperate for anything that might draw developers' attention away from iOS and Android. If you start from the viewpoint that you need to provide a phone-specific display server anyway, you can see the thinking. There are bits I think are wrong with this plan, but it's coherent.
shmerl 13y ago
I still hope at some point Canonical will come to their senses and will dump Mir for Wayland. Otherwise this mess will only increase in the future. A related question. What will SteamOS use after X.org? Wayland or Mir?
- pachydermic 13y ago
  Excellent question. But if they really are going to be a healthy contributor to the whole community, then it makes sense for them to pick one and contribute to it. Who knows what's actually going to happen! I don't want to get my hopes up, though. Graphics support sucks in Linux for (presumably) some economic reason - maybe Valve entering the market is just a hedge against Windows locking down their software market and they don't really care about Linux or at least not about the wider community. But Gaben has said some pretty promising things. Who knows. Very interesting and exciting, isn't it?
- mackal 13y ago
  A little birdy informed me that SteamOS is based on Ubuntu, they didn't go into more details besides saying it was a dumb choice. I would assume its based on X.org since neither Wayland nor Mir are mature enough.
  - epsylon 13y ago
    > it was a dumb choice On the contrary, I think it's a great choice. Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially for unexperienced users. It's not a coincidence that it's been adopted by many big cos (Google comes to mind) or administrations. In particular, hardware support will be key to the success of SteamOS and there are only few contenders that compete with the friendliness of Ubuntu (especially a Valve-customized one).
    - simias 13y ago
      Isn't that mainly related to the UI and the packages installed by default (I haven't used ubuntu in like 5 years, but back then it felt just like debian with more stuff installed by default). If Valve makes a complete custom environment for steam OS built around big picture will they really benefit more from using ubuntu versus debian, fedora or any other distro?
krakensden 13y ago
Everyone thinks replacing X.org is a clear and obvious win until they try and do it. The only reason to think differently about Wayland is that a plurality of X.org developers seem to be involved.
Mikeb85 13y ago
They should have stuck with Wayland. Gnome 3.10 supports Wayland, and Fedora 20 will ship with Wayland as an option. openSUSE 13.1 will also ship with Gnome 3.10, so getting Wayland working there shouldn't be hard, and I'm sure the Arch and Gentoo communities will have it working very soon too.
- Jasper_ 13y ago
  As a GNOME developer, there's still a lot of work to do. It's mentioned as a tech preview for a reason. We'll work on shipping with full Wayland support by 3.12, but don't expect it to be fully usable or represent the final state of Wayland support.
- dylan-m 13y ago
  GNOME 3.10 doesn't completely support Wayland, yet. Parts of the software stack do, so you can run Weston in a window and then run individual GTK+3 apps with the Wayland backend and they'll probably work, but actual end-to-end Wayland is aimed at a later date. It is getting close, though :)
SCdF 13y ago
I really want Mir to die. Unless I'm misunderstanding the situation Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux, and afaict Mir exists for no technical reason; it exists because Canonical don't want to play in anyone else's sandpit.
- spongle 13y ago
  Well by killing XMir they've done that. There is a lot of legacy xlib stuff floating around that will now be excluded from the Ubuntu platform. Mir is just a square wheel like all the other crap I have to uninstall when someone installs Ubuntu. I'm back on debian myself now.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    They've not killed XMir, and they've not excluded anything. They've delayed shipping XMir and Mir for the Ubuntu desktop releases until they can sort out some remaining issues.
    - rodgerd 13y ago
      Given that one of the stated rationales for Mir was the ability to deliver quicker than Wayland, that's a fairly significant decision. Fedora 20 is going to launch with Wayland as a preview, after all.
      - YokoZar 13y ago
        Ubuntu 13.10 will have Mir as a preview as well, just not enabled by default on the desktop (but, notably, enabled by default on phones)
        levosmetalo 13y ago
        Which phones?
        13y ago
drivebyacct2 13y ago
GNOME is shipping Wayland support. KF5 and KDE5 between now and next spring will enable KDE on Wayland. It's great to watch Mir.
quink 13y ago
But I'm confused now! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_with_mir_instead_of_x/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_... said the following three months 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. Surely it must have been ready to ship in a major release of the most popular Linux distribution given that! There were only minor glitches and it's run a whole two weeks on the damn founder's personal laptop! How could it have been declared not ready to ship three months, such a vast period of time, later! /s Please grow up, Canonical. Also, Wayland.
- YokoZar 13y ago
  The main problem area blocking the release is multi-monitor support. A regression there means it will break for some users, even though those who don't use this feature might have a huge improvement (such as mark did).
devx 13y ago
I wonder if this has anything to do with Intel's decision to stop supporting Mir. Might've set them back just enough so they won't be ready to ship it on time for 13.10.
- mhw 13y ago
  Your question is answered in the Q&A page linked from the email: Has the recent revert from Intel triggered this decision? A: No. It is completely unrelated. This decision was made by our engineering management team and was based solely on the current quality feature set we defined for XMir, independent of any discussions with Intel.
jbeard4 13y ago
Does anyone know which graphics cards Mir is intended to support on release?
methodin 13y ago
People say competition is a good thing, which I agree with. Competition is arguably the lynchpin of capitalism that keeps us from a slew of monopolies in each market. It appears however that personal vendettas trump that sentiment based on the posts here.

117 points by ovis 13y ago

comex 13y ago

Does Canonical have any coherent explanation for why they are still pressing on with their own incompatible rewrite of a display server when a perfectly good one was already in development?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
acabal 13y ago
My guess is that they're doing it so they can have control over the pace of development and features. I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity. Mir might be his attempt to control the stack in anticipation of getting burned again. After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of the product. What if he wants feature Z included in the next dev cycle to support cool new mobile hardware? With Wayland, he'd have to play politics with the developers and pray. With Mir, he can just order it. Not to say that I think it's a good decision. In fact I think it's one of the most ruinous decisions for the Linux community that Canonical could have possibly made. Graphics support has been the biggest thorn in Linux's side for years, and dividing the ecosystem at a time when Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable. But I can see the short-sighted business logic behind it.
- Jasper_ 13y ago
  > I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity. As someone who was there from the beginning, this is false. The hackfest where some of the initial goals of GNOME Shell were planned out in 2008 at Canonical offices. We were wondering why some of the Canonical guys who were listed as RSVPing weren't there... until we went to lunch and saw that they were having their own private meeting. I don't think we'll ever know what was discussed -- perhaps their indicator system. Canonical employees were participating in the Boston hackfests in 2008 and 2009 and we welcomed their presence; they actually had a lot of good ideas which we integrated. I, personally, never had any issues with Canonical's work and I think all of my coworkers would agree. I'm really not sure where this perceived "us vs. them" animosity came from, but I never felt it personally. They're still absolutely welcome to contribute back to GNOME if they want to (and, to be fair, some still do).
  - SEJeff 13y ago
    I was at the Boston summit in 2010 (for the snowy hackfest mainly) and distinctly remember some unpleasant and very public back and forth between (I believe) Jon William McCann and a Canonical employee who was trying to troll shell and was rightfully called out for their foolishness. I got a _distinct_ feeling of us vs them, but that was in 2010.
- epsylon 13y ago
  > Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable. Valve's announcement is only a few days old. Mir precedes it by months.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  > After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of the product. That's certainly unbiased wording.
SCdF 13y ago
No. They want to have control, and they think they are large enough to get away with it. They're probably right.
jfoster 13y ago
Canonical's explanation is on this page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec
- comex 13y ago
  It's a short, vague explanation that, other than a correction for a significant inaccuracy in the original version (which I think demonstrates a serious lack of research!), has had no update since it was originally published several months ago, despite the almost universal criticism of Canonical's reasoning by the community. I don't think this is particularly coherent.
  - walid 13y ago
    It is definitely not vague and seems to be very coherent in their description of features that both X and Wayland are lacking. I'm not a Linux dev but their points seem well justified.
    - contingencies 13y ago
      They have maintainability across a wide number of devices as a requirement. They have low powered devices with existing, third-party, potentially closed source graphics drivers as a requirement. I don't know about anyone else here, but every time I set up a new system I have to waste hours getting X11 and the console resolution working right. Sometimes, they never work right. Add to that modern features like display brightness, backlit keyboards, power management, external monitor outputs, and touchscreen input with gesture support and it's unrealistic for X11 to spread to the vast number of new, lower powered devices with less technical users without some serious further work to standardize and normalize handling of differences. Therefore I am glad, for the nontechnical majority of the world, that someone out there is bothering to try to make a reference open source mechanism for removing these problems so an install doesn't end in crashes with weird kernel boot messages about drm and BIOS upgrades and X configurations and input device drivers... even if I continue to use gentoo myself.
      - 13y ago
j_s 13y ago
Perhaps the ability to re-license for commercial use? http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html > They can relicense Mir (and any other GPLv3 projects they own) under licenses > that keep their hardware partners happy, and they can ship in the phone market

mindstab 13y ago

Good, they aren't going to have a release that is a massive regression (again). I was planning on skipping 13.10 because everything so far said it would have worse performance and more bugs. OTOH it's a bit scary that their release engineering is making big dramatic structural changes in X servers 3-4 weeks before launch. It should be in frozen locked down beta now... The real solution was that XMir never should have been jammed into their release so forceful while obviously so unready in the first place... Still this is better than launching with it anyways, so half marks Canonical. But this is nothing like the rock solid stability you provided in Beta and Alpha last decade.

Steltek 13y ago
Why not? It worked for PulseAudio, right? Or how about the upgrade between the last two LTS releases? I can't understand Canonical's downright eagerness to force broken software out the door just to appease their roadmap and rigid release schedule. It's pushed as the newbie friendly distro but behaves more like Gentoo when it's time to upgrade. I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice.
- Jach 13y ago
  I'm not sure why you're throwing Gentoo under the bus when its upgrade system is completely different. There is no "time to upgrade" because there are no releases to upgrade to -- you just install new versions of the software you happen to use when they come out and you feel like it. My own experiences with keeping my Gentoo systems up-to-date have been considerably more enjoyable than keeping my Ubuntu systems up-to-date. (I can no longer keep my GUI-reliant Ubuntu systems up-to-date because they're still using 10.04 as I refuse to "upgrade" past Gnome2. So it was bye-bye Ubuntu for me for new installs.) I agree with jcastro that Ubuntu Server is good, it's easy. It's a popular choice for Amazon ec2 images. It also represents a different mindset in system administration compared to the classic one that went like "Install CentOS version X and keep it for 5 years, sure the software is old as crap even when version X just came out and we hope we can apply security patches without needing a whole new version that depends on something the package manager can't provide, but it's stable!!!" (Just for fun I googled "centos packages old as crap" and this popped up as the first link. http://scalability.org/?p=6270 http://scalability.org/?p=6270 Notice how it's from two months ago? It's not a new phenomenon either.)

codex 13y ago

Canonical is desperate to differentiate and this make money. However, when all the code is open and free, there is no way to differentiate for the better. It's like selling insurance. Everyone's product is the same.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jared314 13y ago
A new display server does not differentiate an OS in anyway that would remotely make money. It is more likely they tried to use a technical solution to solve a non-technical problem (display server consensus on an old architecture).
- rodgerd 13y ago
  A new display server under GPL3 with mandatory CLA would be an excellent way of making money if you got enough leverage that you could start charging hardware vendors if they wanted a private copy so they could avoid disclosing their driver modifications. It's same relicensing model MySQL made money with.
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    Except no one is shopping around for a display server. Lots of people were (and still are) shopping around for a DB.
- regularfry 13y ago
  Assuming they make money on phones, it is. They can say "Look, mobile app development is just desktop app development! No special environments! Just cross-compile the Exact Same Code(tm)!" or maybe "It's Just Javascript!(tm)" and all of a sudden they've got a ready-made ecosystem of app developers who don't even need to install any new tools other than what they've already got installed on their desktops to provide content for their phones. More content -> more sales -> more money, and they must be absolutely desperate for anything that might draw developers' attention away from iOS and Android. If you start from the viewpoint that you need to provide a phone-specific display server anyway, you can see the thinking. There are bits I think are wrong with this plan, but it's coherent.

shmerl 13y ago

I still hope at some point Canonical will come to their senses and will dump Mir for Wayland. Otherwise this mess will only increase in the future. A related question. What will SteamOS use after X.org? Wayland or Mir?

pachydermic 13y ago
Excellent question. But if they really are going to be a healthy contributor to the whole community, then it makes sense for them to pick one and contribute to it. Who knows what's actually going to happen! I don't want to get my hopes up, though. Graphics support sucks in Linux for (presumably) some economic reason - maybe Valve entering the market is just a hedge against Windows locking down their software market and they don't really care about Linux or at least not about the wider community. But Gaben has said some pretty promising things. Who knows. Very interesting and exciting, isn't it?
mackal 13y ago
A little birdy informed me that SteamOS is based on Ubuntu, they didn't go into more details besides saying it was a dumb choice. I would assume its based on X.org since neither Wayland nor Mir are mature enough.
- epsylon 13y ago
  > it was a dumb choice On the contrary, I think it's a great choice. Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially for unexperienced users. It's not a coincidence that it's been adopted by many big cos (Google comes to mind) or administrations. In particular, hardware support will be key to the success of SteamOS and there are only few contenders that compete with the friendliness of Ubuntu (especially a Valve-customized one).
  - simias 13y ago
    Isn't that mainly related to the UI and the packages installed by default (I haven't used ubuntu in like 5 years, but back then it felt just like debian with more stuff installed by default). If Valve makes a complete custom environment for steam OS built around big picture will they really benefit more from using ubuntu versus debian, fedora or any other distro?

krakensden 13y ago

Everyone thinks replacing X.org is a clear and obvious win until they try and do it. The only reason to think differently about Wayland is that a plurality of X.org developers seem to be involved.

Mikeb85 13y ago

They should have stuck with Wayland. Gnome 3.10 supports Wayland, and Fedora 20 will ship with Wayland as an option. openSUSE 13.1 will also ship with Gnome 3.10, so getting Wayland working there shouldn't be hard, and I'm sure the Arch and Gentoo communities will have it working very soon too.

Jasper_ 13y ago
As a GNOME developer, there's still a lot of work to do. It's mentioned as a tech preview for a reason. We'll work on shipping with full Wayland support by 3.12, but don't expect it to be fully usable or represent the final state of Wayland support.
dylan-m 13y ago
GNOME 3.10 doesn't completely support Wayland, yet. Parts of the software stack do, so you can run Weston in a window and then run individual GTK+3 apps with the Wayland backend and they'll probably work, but actual end-to-end Wayland is aimed at a later date. It is getting close, though :)

SCdF 13y ago

I really want Mir to die. Unless I'm misunderstanding the situation Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux, and afaict Mir exists for no technical reason; it exists because Canonical don't want to play in anyone else's sandpit.

spongle 13y ago
Well by killing XMir they've done that. There is a lot of legacy xlib stuff floating around that will now be excluded from the Ubuntu platform. Mir is just a square wheel like all the other crap I have to uninstall when someone installs Ubuntu. I'm back on debian myself now.
- vidarh 13y ago
  They've not killed XMir, and they've not excluded anything. They've delayed shipping XMir and Mir for the Ubuntu desktop releases until they can sort out some remaining issues.
  - rodgerd 13y ago
    Given that one of the stated rationales for Mir was the ability to deliver quicker than Wayland, that's a fairly significant decision. Fedora 20 is going to launch with Wayland as a preview, after all.
    - YokoZar 13y ago
      Ubuntu 13.10 will have Mir as a preview as well, just not enabled by default on the desktop (but, notably, enabled by default on phones)
      - levosmetalo 13y ago
        Which phones?
        13y ago

drivebyacct2 13y ago

GNOME is shipping Wayland support. KF5 and KDE5 between now and next spring will enable KDE on Wayland. It's great to watch Mir.

quink 13y ago

But I'm confused now! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_with_mir_instead_of_x/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_... said the following three months 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. Surely it must have been ready to ship in a major release of the most popular Linux distribution given that! There were only minor glitches and it's run a whole two weeks on the damn founder's personal laptop! How could it have been declared not ready to ship three months, such a vast period of time, later! /s Please grow up, Canonical. Also, Wayland.

YokoZar 13y ago
The main problem area blocking the release is multi-monitor support. A regression there means it will break for some users, even though those who don't use this feature might have a huge improvement (such as mark did).

devx 13y ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with Intel's decision to stop supporting Mir. Might've set them back just enough so they won't be ready to ship it on time for 13.10.

mhw 13y ago
Your question is answered in the Q&A page linked from the email: Has the recent revert from Intel triggered this decision? A: No. It is completely unrelated. This decision was made by our engineering management team and was based solely on the current quality feature set we defined for XMir, independent of any discussions with Intel.

jbeard4 13y ago

Does anyone know which graphics cards Mir is intended to support on release?

methodin 13y ago

People say competition is a good thing, which I agree with. Competition is arguably the lynchpin of capitalism that keeps us from a slew of monopolies in each market. It appears however that personal vendettas trump that sentiment based on the posts here.