9 ms·

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 te

by 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?
        frank_boyd 13y ago
        There are 4 "officially supported" devices being Canonical's priority and then a whole list of other devices that can use the Ubuntu Touch OS: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices To check on the progress of the 4 priority devices, see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZDNWliMmV1YUJ3Zk1pQlpDdGp4VFE#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZ... Conclusion: 1. You can use Ubuntu Touch on a Galaxy Nexus already today, for the most important features. 2. The Ubuntu Touch launch date was set for the end of this month (october 2013).
  - spongle 13y ago
    Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it. A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken, resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users (including me) and no more donations... Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      > Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it. No, it is delaying it from being the default on Ubuntu by 6 months. > A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken Really? How so? I have not noticed anything broken at all. How exactly is it broken? > resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users I really very much doubt most users will even notice, and I also think you severely overestimate how many of those who do notice will care, and how many of those who care who sees Mir as something negative and/or are bothered by the delay. > Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X. The point is they will eventually ship XMir, Mir and Mir-enabled toolkit versions by default, so everyone that don't take explicit steps to install a plain X server instead will be running Mir whether or not they run all their familiar apps - including X apps - on top of it.
    - forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
      Please, calm down. Things are working OK. The world is not ending and Ubuntu repository is working just fine.
      - spongle 13y ago
        For now. Watch what happens when Mir ships: 1. Noone will use Mir because xlib apps and non-ported toolkits will fail miserably. 2. It will not get tested properly. 3. Release+1 with XMir will be shipped and Mir will be turned on. 4. All hell will break loose. If it doesn't happen, I'll cook and eat my laptop. The only flag waving so far has been "shuttleworth installed it on his dell and it worked ok for a couple of weeks with some problems".
        keithpeter 13y ago
        Canonical's target market is mobile devices. I suspect they will be testing a complete mobile stack. As mentioned above in this discussion, there are 4 example phones that already have functioning images. Shuttleworth probably knows how to keep his Dell working, and will possibly be sticking to LTS releases.
- makomk 13y ago
  Last I heard XWayland didn't actually work properly either, and the official position of the Wayland devs was that it was Not Their Problem because it wasn't part of Wayland, they had no interest in fixing it, and anyone who suggested this reflected badly on Wayland was just spreading FUD because it wasn't part of Wayland.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    Which, incidentally, is fair enough.
- voyou 13y ago
  You've misunderstood this decision. They've delayed XMir and Mir. Ubuntu 13.10 will ship with X as its display server, just like all previous versions of Ubuntu.
devx 13y ago
I don't know much about Wayland, but I know Mir is trying to be very efficient performance and battery life-wise even for smartphones, since it will be based on OpenGL ES 2.0. Can Wayland do the same?
- shmerl 13y ago
  Wayland already does the same. Sailfish OS which is going in production in the end of 2013 in Jolla's handset is using Wayland. https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/
  - devx 13y ago
    What about this: > Other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include Android’s input stack[11] and Google’s Protocol Buffers.[12] An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for "the ARM world and Android graphics stack" I think Canonical wanted to be able to easily port Ubuntu to Android devices in the future. Will that be possible with Wayland, too? I think that's a pretty important aspect, because Android is the new "Windows", and there will be a ton of Android devices in the future, and just like Linux adapted to working on Windows machines, they will need to adapt to work on Android devices very well, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      I believe that a lot of the Android integration parts they rely on were developed by a dev who was later hired by Sailfish, and who are as noted above, planning on using Wayland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29
    - shmerl 13y ago
      Mer achitect - Carsten Munk started the libhybris project, to allow using binoic drivers for Android with normal glibc Linux system. Mer is the core used in Sailfish (and Carsten Munk works for Jolla as well). See: * http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an... * http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-an... Canonical started using libhybris without even crediting the author first.
vidarh 13y ago
I doubt it is going to matter much. The major toolkits will continue to support X11 backends for the foreseeable future, and systems with both Wayland and Mir will be shipping with X servers by default for the foreseeable future and likely with X servers as optional packages "forever" afterwards. It is going to be an issue for people doing low-level/backend GUI stuff and pretty much nobody else.
- antocv 13y ago
  It is going to be an issue for everybody else because when things dont work as they should, and they wont because now there is two backends to support for the toolkits, it will be Wayland here and Mir there, completely useless for the user, but what will you say in the error message "Something stopped working, sorry?". Just like alsa, oss, jack, esd and pulseaudio. I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation. There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had, and I suspect that's the experience most users have. Pretty much everything just works, and a lot of that I believe is squarely because they are perfectly happy to break convention if that is what it takes for them to get where they want to be. > and they wont because now there is two backends to support for the toolkits Both Qt and GTK have far more than just two backends already, yet they keep working. Two more is hardly going to be vastly more difficult to get right. E.g. Gtk has Windows and OS X versions, as well as a HTML5 backend, and a DirectFB backend. And presumably the X backend will stay around too. > but what will you say in the error message "Something stopped working, sorry?". What does it say today if the X server fails? > I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation. So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around. If you want a conservative distribution, perhaps you will be happier with Debian. > There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland. If people write their apps to run straight on Mir, sure. Just as if people write their code to target any library that isn't universally available. But just like exceedingly few people target X directly without a toolkit or wrapper, I think it'll be exceedingly unlikely that lots of people will clamour to write code targeting Mir directly. Much less likely than depending on pulse-audio functionality, for example.
jcastro 13y ago
> Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux Not really. You know what other Linux doesn't ship Wayland, Mir, or X? Android. And the world hasn't exploded.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Notice how few Linux OSS applications have been ported to Android. Where's LibreOffice for android? Inkscape? Blender? Audacity? GIMP? Thunderbird? Filezilla? Obviously in most of those cases a naive port of the GUI would only be useful for a large tablet with a keyboard and mouse attached. But still, the naive port would be better than nothing. The near-total lack of direct ports between Linux and Android (except for SDL-based games) should tell you that this does cause a problem.
  - jcastro 13y ago
    I think you're lumping platforms with kernels, they're not interchangeable terms. "Linux" isn't a platform because no one has defined what "Linux" is supposed to be. Android and Ubuntu can be platforms because someone can say "An Android app does these things" and then point to an SDK. Ubuntu is doing the same thing. Anyone can take a Linux kernel and then build whatever userspace they want on top of it. Android existing hasn't hurt Linux, it's the dominant mobile OS and is bringing in hardware manufactures to work on the kernel. Sure user space apps are different as you point out, but that's what happens when you give people Lego blocks, not everyone is going to use the same blocks.
    - Pxtl 13y ago
      This is splitting hairs. The mainstream desktop Linux distros all run a similar stack of technology that provides a running environment for the major desktop OSS projects I listed. They all brand themselves as Linux. Yes, technically Linux is only the kernel, but being pedantic about it only muddies up the conversation. When somebody says "this computer runs Linux" they mean Gentoo/Fedora/Ubuntu/Whatever. Everybody knows I meant "mainstream desktop Linux distro software". Correcting that abbreviation adds nothing to the conversation.
sbuk 13y ago
I thought that one of the oft-cited benefits of OSS is choice; surely the existence of both Wayland and Mir offers this? Edit: Re-reading this, it comes of as quite sarcastic, almost patronising. That is not the intent.

by SCdF 13y ago

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?
      - frank_boyd 13y ago
        There are 4 "officially supported" devices being Canonical's priority and then a whole list of other devices that can use the Ubuntu Touch OS: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices To check on the progress of the 4 priority devices, see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZDNWliMmV1YUJ3Zk1pQlpDdGp4VFE#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZ... Conclusion: 1. You can use Ubuntu Touch on a Galaxy Nexus already today, for the most important features. 2. The Ubuntu Touch launch date was set for the end of this month (october 2013).
- spongle 13y ago
  Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it. A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken, resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users (including me) and no more donations... Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    > Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it. No, it is delaying it from being the default on Ubuntu by 6 months. > A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken Really? How so? I have not noticed anything broken at all. How exactly is it broken? > resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users I really very much doubt most users will even notice, and I also think you severely overestimate how many of those who do notice will care, and how many of those who care who sees Mir as something negative and/or are bothered by the delay. > Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X. The point is they will eventually ship XMir, Mir and Mir-enabled toolkit versions by default, so everyone that don't take explicit steps to install a plain X server instead will be running Mir whether or not they run all their familiar apps - including X apps - on top of it.
  - forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
    Please, calm down. Things are working OK. The world is not ending and Ubuntu repository is working just fine.
    - spongle 13y ago
      For now. Watch what happens when Mir ships: 1. Noone will use Mir because xlib apps and non-ported toolkits will fail miserably. 2. It will not get tested properly. 3. Release+1 with XMir will be shipped and Mir will be turned on. 4. All hell will break loose. If it doesn't happen, I'll cook and eat my laptop. The only flag waving so far has been "shuttleworth installed it on his dell and it worked ok for a couple of weeks with some problems".
      - keithpeter 13y ago
        Canonical's target market is mobile devices. I suspect they will be testing a complete mobile stack. As mentioned above in this discussion, there are 4 example phones that already have functioning images. Shuttleworth probably knows how to keep his Dell working, and will possibly be sticking to LTS releases.
makomk 13y ago
Last I heard XWayland didn't actually work properly either, and the official position of the Wayland devs was that it was Not Their Problem because it wasn't part of Wayland, they had no interest in fixing it, and anyone who suggested this reflected badly on Wayland was just spreading FUD because it wasn't part of Wayland.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Which, incidentally, is fair enough.
voyou 13y ago
You've misunderstood this decision. They've delayed XMir and Mir. Ubuntu 13.10 will ship with X as its display server, just like all previous versions of Ubuntu.

devx 13y ago

I don't know much about Wayland, but I know Mir is trying to be very efficient performance and battery life-wise even for smartphones, since it will be based on OpenGL ES 2.0. Can Wayland do the same?

shmerl 13y ago
Wayland already does the same. Sailfish OS which is going in production in the end of 2013 in Jolla's handset is using Wayland. https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/
- devx 13y ago
  What about this: > Other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include Android’s input stack[11] and Google’s Protocol Buffers.[12] An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for "the ARM world and Android graphics stack" I think Canonical wanted to be able to easily port Ubuntu to Android devices in the future. Will that be possible with Wayland, too? I think that's a pretty important aspect, because Android is the new "Windows", and there will be a ton of Android devices in the future, and just like Linux adapted to working on Windows machines, they will need to adapt to work on Android devices very well, too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    I believe that a lot of the Android integration parts they rely on were developed by a dev who was later hired by Sailfish, and who are as noted above, planning on using Wayland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29
  - shmerl 13y ago
    Mer achitect - Carsten Munk started the libhybris project, to allow using binoic drivers for Android with normal glibc Linux system. Mer is the core used in Sailfish (and Carsten Munk works for Jolla as well). See: * http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an... * http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-an... Canonical started using libhybris without even crediting the author first.

vidarh 13y ago

I doubt it is going to matter much. The major toolkits will continue to support X11 backends for the foreseeable future, and systems with both Wayland and Mir will be shipping with X servers by default for the foreseeable future and likely with X servers as optional packages "forever" afterwards. It is going to be an issue for people doing low-level/backend GUI stuff and pretty much nobody else.

antocv 13y ago
It is going to be an issue for everybody else because when things dont work as they should, and they wont because now there is two backends to support for the toolkits, it will be Wayland here and Mir there, completely useless for the user, but what will you say in the error message "Something stopped working, sorry?". Just like alsa, oss, jack, esd and pulseaudio. I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation. There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had, and I suspect that's the experience most users have. Pretty much everything just works, and a lot of that I believe is squarely because they are perfectly happy to break convention if that is what it takes for them to get where they want to be. > and they wont because now there is two backends to support for the toolkits Both Qt and GTK have far more than just two backends already, yet they keep working. Two more is hardly going to be vastly more difficult to get right. E.g. Gtk has Windows and OS X versions, as well as a HTML5 backend, and a DirectFB backend. And presumably the X backend will stay around too. > but what will you say in the error message "Something stopped working, sorry?". What does it say today if the X server fails? > I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation. So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around. If you want a conservative distribution, perhaps you will be happier with Debian. > There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland. If people write their apps to run straight on Mir, sure. Just as if people write their code to target any library that isn't universally available. But just like exceedingly few people target X directly without a toolkit or wrapper, I think it'll be exceedingly unlikely that lots of people will clamour to write code targeting Mir directly. Much less likely than depending on pulse-audio functionality, for example.

jcastro 13y ago

> Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux Not really. You know what other Linux doesn't ship Wayland, Mir, or X? Android. And the world hasn't exploded.

Pxtl 13y ago
Notice how few Linux OSS applications have been ported to Android. Where's LibreOffice for android? Inkscape? Blender? Audacity? GIMP? Thunderbird? Filezilla? Obviously in most of those cases a naive port of the GUI would only be useful for a large tablet with a keyboard and mouse attached. But still, the naive port would be better than nothing. The near-total lack of direct ports between Linux and Android (except for SDL-based games) should tell you that this does cause a problem.
- jcastro 13y ago
  I think you're lumping platforms with kernels, they're not interchangeable terms. "Linux" isn't a platform because no one has defined what "Linux" is supposed to be. Android and Ubuntu can be platforms because someone can say "An Android app does these things" and then point to an SDK. Ubuntu is doing the same thing. Anyone can take a Linux kernel and then build whatever userspace they want on top of it. Android existing hasn't hurt Linux, it's the dominant mobile OS and is bringing in hardware manufactures to work on the kernel. Sure user space apps are different as you point out, but that's what happens when you give people Lego blocks, not everyone is going to use the same blocks.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    This is splitting hairs. The mainstream desktop Linux distros all run a similar stack of technology that provides a running environment for the major desktop OSS projects I listed. They all brand themselves as Linux. Yes, technically Linux is only the kernel, but being pedantic about it only muddies up the conversation. When somebody says "this computer runs Linux" they mean Gentoo/Fedora/Ubuntu/Whatever. Everybody knows I meant "mainstream desktop Linux distro software". Correcting that abbreviation adds nothing to the conversation.

sbuk 13y ago

I thought that one of the oft-cited benefits of OSS is choice; surely the existence of both Wayland and Mir offers this? Edit: Re-reading this, it comes of as quite sarcastic, almost patronising. That is not the intent.