Maybe this is a good idea, I don't know about X/Wayland enough to say. But it worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings. It's also less knowledge to have to keep in your head for system administration stuff. (Which is still necessary in Ubuntu, regardless of what the "it just works for me" people say.)
Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is standing alone with Compiz, Unity, Upstart, Launchpad, and Mir, all pretty fundamental pieces of the core system. In a decade, will switching from Ubuntu to Debian be as big of a culture shock as switching from Windows to Linux?
In terms of user interface have those standards delivered?
I remember fonts being really screwed up for a long time. Longer that it should have been. Just getting anti-aliased fonts was major deal.
Then graphics drivers are a mess. I blame manufacturers of devices here. But still treating it as a black box I just see that is inferior. I know Linus flipped of NVidia but at the same time is a chicken and egg problem. Why should they bother to improve their drivers? To make GNOME 2 desktops look shinier? You criticized Compiz, ok, what is the alternative?
Google did pretty much the same with Android. We have surfaceflinger, dalvik, custom IPC mechanisms. Now they are trying to slowly merge some of them in.
> Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption.
That is what I think. Here is a company that tried to push and everyone resisted and said "you must adhere to standards defined by a 20 year old plus graphical server". I think that is silly. Let them innovate. I for one, am excited for them.
One of the largest issues that I can foresee with this is proprietary drivers for graphics cards. NVIDIA has delivered high quality drivers for Linux/X11 for their cards and tend to release new drivers quickly when new X11 versions are released. Are gfx hardware manufacturers expected to support separate drivers for Linux (X11) and Ubuntu (mir)? and potentially distributions that use Wayland? I can only imagine how AMD/ATI will handle putting out graphics drivers for some other windowing system that Ubuntu decides to use.
From TFA: "Right now, Mir does not run on desktop hardware that requires closed source drivers. However, we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind." Good luck with that. How many years did it take to get decent AMD drivers for Linux/X11? The catalyst X11 drivers are still currently a mess.
> What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings
Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc. all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly more open OS X, which isn't good at all.
> Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu.
I'd rather know Unix, not GNU/Linux or Ubuntu. Maybe Ubuntu diverging a bit from other Linux distributions, and from GNU, will encourage people to write portable code.
Canonical might have problems with the current de'facto toolchains of the GNU/Linux ecosystem, or it is to large or unmaintainable for what they want to do with it. Like you said maybe its a good idea, maybe its not.
Starting clean you can take all the knowledge gained from previous open projects and create something fresh that is more lightweight, faster and easier to maintain. But will this new components live up to it expectations? Only time will tell, and Canonical is willing to back that venture.
I also believe one need to stop calling linux, linux or the lesser adopted but more correct term for me GNU/Linux. Call the operating system you use by its distribution name, that is the actual ecosystem you using. Which yes, is part of a greater Open Source, Free Software ecosystem.
But to achieve inovation one needs to boundaries, and at the moment Ubuntu is the OS on the desktop with most commercial and adoptions success.
I switched my personal computer from Ubuntu some time ago. It's kind of startling when you see the divergence from core Linux tooling that Ubuntu's been doing.
I believe this is the kick in the pants my team at work needs to evaluate moving to Debian deployments instead of Ubuntu.
They are not changing the path of Linux, but the path of graphical UX on Linux. I think it's a good thing. The GUI is simple enough for my grandma to use, yet I can open a terminal and have a very familiar experience. I see no harm here, as they will not diverge from Linux itself.
Critically, they seem to be putting a lot of effort into being inter-operable with Wayland and X. We have two major widget toolkits and it's not a problem because I can use applications from both without any trouble.
> What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpinnings, and everyone benefits from a large community fixing bugs and improving those underpinnings.
I don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing or not. I mean, sure, it's handy to be able to switch distros seamlessly, but has that ever really been possible (aside from going from, say, Ubuntu to Debian, or Fedora to CentOS)? Going from Fedora to Ubuntu or vice versa, for example, has never really been a completely seamless experience.
It's always been the case that, in the strictest sense, "Linux" is a kernel, not an Operating System, and each distro is really it's own OS. That they had a lot in common was a fortunate bit of happenstance in a lot of ways. Now, they start to diverge, that may mean more competition, which should lead to faster innovation and even more progress. And as long as everything is F/OSS, the distros that pick a bit of tech that "loses" can always switch to the "winner" later.
I'm not saying that it would be totally pain free, mind you. But I can see how this sort of move might benefit everyone in the long run.
Would you care to elaborate on why you dislike launchpad? I haven't used it as a developer, but as a user I've found it really useful, particularly the way it integrates with apt-get via PPAs.
I don't understand all the negative reactions. Canonical is recognizing various problems in making GNU/Linux mainstream. They are then innovating at a deeper level (fixing root causes rather than duct-taping) to ultimately attempt to really attract the layman to a mobile or desktop GNU/Linux distro. Devs don't need to target Mir if they don't want to, Linux users can switch to another Debian if they don't like it, and the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS.
Can someone explain to me why this is all so horrible?
Are these people designing a better answer to Wayland because it's really better, or because it always looks easy when you don't intimately understand the problem space? I honestly don't know, but it's a question I'd like answered before I get excited.
1) For the past two years or so the community has been led to believe Canonical would be adopting Wayland. After the slow build of anticipation over that, it was dropped out of the blue.
2) Simple distrust of Canonical's homemade projects after the Unity fiasco.
3) Fragmentation of effort to unseat X. The chance of repeating the history of every other display server that was going to "replace X within Y years" becomes that much higher with two competing alternatives marginalizing each other.
If this news had come three years ago I imagine the response would be wildly different.
Regardless of the technical considerations, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of many different companies co-operating on core software. Canonical's philosophy seems to fly directly against that - so far we have:
Launchpad / Upstart / Unity / Mir
Launchpad is free-software by name only, and Canonical actively discourage you to setup your own instance.
Upstart hasn't been widely adopted outside of Ubuntu, and has been replaced by the technically superior systemd.
Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view, and now we have Mir. So past history isn't filling me with confidence. Their philosophy seems to be "patch first, ask questions later".
I'm amazed how Canonical has the resources to keep branching out so much while producing a distribution every 6 months. I was under the impression they weren't yet making a profit.
> the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS.
Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something?
We should let them be. Laymen will invariably be better served by Microsoft or Apple, trying to win them over in some sort of misguided drive to "win" market-share seems foolish. Linux should focus on it's niche, and Microsoft and Apple theirs.
This market-share envy makes no sense to me. Does Artic Cat stare with envy at Ford's userbase and expend effort trying to get suburban parents to drive their kids to school on snowmobiles? That would just be silly.
If Linux idiots weren't senselessly married to terrible in-group traditions and the status quo, it wouldn't have taken 20 years (or Canonical) to replace the clusterfuck that is X.
Basically, Canonical appears not to be publically consulting with the other distros (e.g., RH, Gentoo, Arch) about their changes. If they were, and there was a general consensus of a plan, I would personally not be bothered at all. But they seem to be content to pursue unilateral forking of what Linux means, and IMO that's not ok.
Ubuntu has been a Canonical project that is based on Linux for so many years. It is hardly community driven OS that people believe. I think it is a good thing. They are moving forward in some direction. They will make mistakes. Hopefully they will learn out of it. There is nothing wrong in it. In general Linux userspace is very fragmented. Organizations and developers seldom agree on anything. Ubuntu can't provide a true desktop user experience in such a space. And there are always distributions like Arch Linux which offer true freedom and completely stick to Linux specs.
The Layman doesn't want a desktop at all; they want a smartphone or a tablet. Want to drive mass adoption of Linux? Write a killer app for Android.
The folks who do want desktops, want those desktops to run software like MS Office or Adobe CS. If Linux can't do that, it does not matter how shiny it is.
You are sacrificing your objectivity, there is no reason other distros cannot be 'just as shiny' as Ubuntu or Mac OS.
Furthermore it is horrible because Canonical has a history of secrecy and authoritarianism and they absolutely go against the spirit of open source software development.
especially since people have been slamming canonical for years for being mere repackagers who were not contributing any significant code to the ecosystem.
An obvious clarification first: Wayland is a protocol definition that defines how a client application should talk to a compositor component. It touches areas like surface creation/destruction, graphics buffer allocation/management, input event handling and a rough prototype for the integration of shell components. However, our evaluation of the protocol definition revealed that the Wayland protocol suffers from multiple problems, including:
The input event handling partly recreates the X semantics and is thus likely to expose similar problems to the ones we described in the introductory section.
The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged from our perspective and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the protocol.
However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but it didn't fit our requirements and we decided to go for the following architecture w.r.t. to protocol-integration:
* A protocol-agnostic inner core that is extremely well-defined, well-tested and portable.
* An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols.
In summary, we have not chosen Wayland/Weston as our basis for delivering a next-generation user experience as it does not fulfill our requirements completely. More to this, with our protocol- and platform-agnostic approach, we can make sure that we reach our goal of a consistent and beautiful user experience across platforms and device form factors. However, Wayland support could be added either by providing a Wayland-specific frontend implementation for our display server or by providing a client-side implementation of libwayland that ultimately talks to Mir."
>This is the worst path Canonical could have possibly chosen. Now developers across all different toolkits and applications, from Gtk+ to Wine, will need to maintain massive patchsets to integrate with Ubuntu. Either that or run in a rootless X window in "legacy" mode.
>This will not end well for interoperability, for developers, or for the wider Linux ecosystem. Bad times.
That comment on OMG! Ubuntu! is making me uncomfortable with the consequences this might have for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I am not sure about how far I can trust that comment, but the Phoronix article[1] explains it better:
>Canonical developers will make to see that applications relying upon Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL, etc will be able to use Mir in an "out of the box" manner. The legacy X support will come from an in-session root-less X Server.
I would, though, like to know more about the consequences for this. First of all, we know that Unity will be much faster, since this thing needs to run on phones too and Unity will actually be a "real thing" instead of just a Window Manager (Compiz) plugin.
>Isn't a point of FOSS that people can all contribute to one major project instead of reinventing the wheel?
That is another comment on OMG! Ubuntu! and I completely agree with it. Sure, freedom of choice is great, but why not use Wayland, really? It was designed from scratch to work for everybody.
This is awesome! I really can't wait. Having been dealing with the drm/kms stuff to try to build applications "near the metal" on small devices has been painful painful painful. Just too many pots, each with their own sous chef. Someone to put some structure around that and get the GPU folks in line makes so much sense.
I have this question as well. Especially since they have already done so much work around Android for Ubuntu touch, why not simply build, what will essentially be desktop Android with a Unity Shell.
I notice that rasterization to non-display devices (e.g. printers) isn't mentioned in the proposal at all. This was a serious weakness of X11 and I'm surprised it's not discussed. In mainstream consumer OSes, such capability is part of the basic graphics toolkits (GDI, Carbon).
If Canonical is serious about attracting mainstream Linux adoption, this is going to have to be addressed from the start.
Remoting over a network with latency is not even an afterthought; none of those words appear in this spec at all. I'm worried that a new display system might start getting traction in the industry while assuming there's only one computer in the world I care about and that I'm sitting in front of it, because that would be a huge step backwards.
On the one hand, this looks like one good way to get rid of the massive bag of hurt that is X; on the other, seriously Canonical? Re-inventing another huge chunk of the stack just because? NIH syndrome much?
Just wanted to mention that the news of Mir has hit wayland's mailing list[1]. I'm very curious to see what the wayland developers think of all this.
A lot of work has already went into wayland and in making things work with it (gtk3, qt5, clutter etc). This is truly an ambitious project and I doubt that ubuntu engineers would needlessly want to write all of this from scratch if there weren't legitimate shortcomings in wayland's architecture.
Personally, I'm looking forward to my wayland powered, fedora 20 desktop running the yet to be invented WMonad tiling window compositor.
I don't hate this decision. I probably won't upgrade as soon as it comes out, but in my opinion linux ecosystem needs competition in the display server segment.
If they screw it up there are plenty distros to choose from.
If this is going to have any real hope of replacing X it also needs to be licensed as liberally as X is, otherwise, it's doomed in many commercial sectors. (Current mir license appears to be GPLv3.)
This is Ubuntu's "Bada" move - it is scared of being assimilated by Android that it is forgetting that it can truly innovate in the UX and not by building walled gardens around display managers.
Ubuntu already has significant investment in Surfaceflinger/Android via its Touch vertical. It has also started migrating to QT/QML for its shell (which work really well on Android). There is a significant opportunity to innovate on UX (like Blackberry Z10), rather than throw away the ecosystem that would come with adopting an Android core.
Yesterday, I couldnt join a GoToMeeting using Ubuntu. But just after, I did it in less than 2 minutes by using an app oumy Android device. That is a huge ecosystem, that I want to use on my desktop (I dont know how the desktop UX for a touch app will work, but I hope it will).
I say that Ubuntu, Google and Valve should sit together and come up with a graphics+sound backend that will work together. And let me play Half Life 3 on my phone and desktop simultaneously !
Given my bad experience during the past years of Ubuntu breaking things in Debian and inventing poor software by themselves, my estimation is that they're not smart enough to pull this off.
in the past when ubuntu was still "linux for human beings" they did great job polishing the linux and providing good linux experience. They were very good improvers.
but then they decided to became inventors. But they don't have strong engineering background and their products were trash.
upstart never provided advanced parallelism and was surpassed by systemd
Top menu and indicators rely on d-bus -- really stupid idea and misuse of technology
they abandon mutter+clutter for closed gl-canvas rendering library + compiz to be used in unity. Now is mutter+clutter far more advanced.
Now they want to change wayland for mir? are they serious? They are not good at inventing things. They will just make linux fragmentation much worst. It's really problematic to make good drivers and gpu companies can't spend money and people on different linux platforms.
ubuntu became from "linux for human beings" to "crappy mac-os like for poor"
Also - kind of a noob question but: my assumption is all the recent ubuntu controversy is over ubuntu desktop. Does this affect the ubuntu server distro at all? Especially since I am trying to learn how to create a well provisioned ubuntu server vm for use with linode deployments...
While I agree with most of you who says they are worried by this development, I understand and welcome this direction Ubuntu is taking, almost making their own, not flavor but unique OS. Which is what people said HP should have done.
It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows. If Ubuntu manage to pull this off, and I think they deserve all our support in that, we will get inspiration for all the open source projects as well as good codebase they can fork and work with. I am not expert in licencing, but anything they accomplish can't be bad for the open source movement.
[+] [-] acabal|13 years ago|reply
Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is standing alone with Compiz, Unity, Upstart, Launchpad, and Mir, all pretty fundamental pieces of the core system. In a decade, will switching from Ubuntu to Debian be as big of a culture shock as switching from Windows to Linux?
[+] [-] rdtsc|13 years ago|reply
I remember fonts being really screwed up for a long time. Longer that it should have been. Just getting anti-aliased fonts was major deal.
Then graphics drivers are a mess. I blame manufacturers of devices here. But still treating it as a black box I just see that is inferior. I know Linus flipped of NVidia but at the same time is a chicken and egg problem. Why should they bother to improve their drivers? To make GNOME 2 desktops look shinier? You criticized Compiz, ok, what is the alternative?
Google did pretty much the same with Android. We have surfaceflinger, dalvik, custom IPC mechanisms. Now they are trying to slowly merge some of them in.
> Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption.
That is what I think. Here is a company that tried to push and everyone resisted and said "you must adhere to standards defined by a 20 year old plus graphical server". I think that is silly. Let them innovate. I for one, am excited for them.
[+] [-] prg318|13 years ago|reply
From TFA: "Right now, Mir does not run on desktop hardware that requires closed source drivers. However, we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind." Good luck with that. How many years did it take to get decent AMD drivers for Linux/X11? The catalyst X11 drivers are still currently a mess.
[+] [-] kunai|13 years ago|reply
Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc. all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly more open OS X, which isn't good at all.
[+] [-] tzs|13 years ago|reply
I'd rather know Unix, not GNU/Linux or Ubuntu. Maybe Ubuntu diverging a bit from other Linux distributions, and from GNU, will encourage people to write portable code.
[+] [-] oneweekwonder|13 years ago|reply
Starting clean you can take all the knowledge gained from previous open projects and create something fresh that is more lightweight, faster and easier to maintain. But will this new components live up to it expectations? Only time will tell, and Canonical is willing to back that venture.
I also believe one need to stop calling linux, linux or the lesser adopted but more correct term for me GNU/Linux. Call the operating system you use by its distribution name, that is the actual ecosystem you using. Which yes, is part of a greater Open Source, Free Software ecosystem.
But to achieve inovation one needs to boundaries, and at the moment Ubuntu is the OS on the desktop with most commercial and adoptions success.
My 0.02c.
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
I believe this is the kick in the pants my team at work needs to evaluate moving to Debian deployments instead of Ubuntu.
[+] [-] simpsond|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shurcooL|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geon|13 years ago|reply
Mir is FOSS too.
[+] [-] mindcrime|13 years ago|reply
It's always been the case that, in the strictest sense, "Linux" is a kernel, not an Operating System, and each distro is really it's own OS. That they had a lot in common was a fortunate bit of happenstance in a lot of ways. Now, they start to diverge, that may mean more competition, which should lead to faster innovation and even more progress. And as long as everything is F/OSS, the distros that pick a bit of tech that "loses" can always switch to the "winner" later.
I'm not saying that it would be totally pain free, mind you. But I can see how this sort of move might benefit everyone in the long run.
[+] [-] shmerl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
It's a little distressing, I agree, but on the other hand, are you ever really "out on your own" when you have a big user base and your code is GPL?
[+] [-] benev|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilgrim689|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|13 years ago|reply
Are these people designing a better answer to Wayland because it's really better, or because it always looks easy when you don't intimately understand the problem space? I honestly don't know, but it's a question I'd like answered before I get excited.
[+] [-] 0x09|13 years ago|reply
1) For the past two years or so the community has been led to believe Canonical would be adopting Wayland. After the slow build of anticipation over that, it was dropped out of the blue.
2) Simple distrust of Canonical's homemade projects after the Unity fiasco.
3) Fragmentation of effort to unseat X. The chance of repeating the history of every other display server that was going to "replace X within Y years" becomes that much higher with two competing alternatives marginalizing each other.
If this news had come three years ago I imagine the response would be wildly different.
[+] [-] hmo09|13 years ago|reply
Launchpad / Upstart / Unity / Mir
Launchpad is free-software by name only, and Canonical actively discourage you to setup your own instance.
Upstart hasn't been widely adopted outside of Ubuntu, and has been replaced by the technically superior systemd.
Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view, and now we have Mir. So past history isn't filling me with confidence. Their philosophy seems to be "patch first, ask questions later".
I'm amazed how Canonical has the resources to keep branching out so much while producing a distribution every 6 months. I was under the impression they weren't yet making a profit.
[+] [-] jlgreco|13 years ago|reply
Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something?
We should let them be. Laymen will invariably be better served by Microsoft or Apple, trying to win them over in some sort of misguided drive to "win" market-share seems foolish. Linux should focus on it's niche, and Microsoft and Apple theirs.
This market-share envy makes no sense to me. Does Artic Cat stare with envy at Ford's userbase and expend effort trying to get suburban parents to drive their kids to school on snowmobiles? That would just be silly.
[+] [-] sneak|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donniezazen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] snowwrestler|13 years ago|reply
The folks who do want desktops, want those desktops to run software like MS Office or Adobe CS. If Linux can't do that, it does not matter how shiny it is.
[+] [-] ihsw|13 years ago|reply
Furthermore it is horrible because Canonical has a history of secrecy and authoritarianism and they absolutely go against the spirit of open source software development.
[+] [-] zem|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiles|13 years ago|reply
"Why Not Wayland / Weston?
An obvious clarification first: Wayland is a protocol definition that defines how a client application should talk to a compositor component. It touches areas like surface creation/destruction, graphics buffer allocation/management, input event handling and a rough prototype for the integration of shell components. However, our evaluation of the protocol definition revealed that the Wayland protocol suffers from multiple problems, including:
The input event handling partly recreates the X semantics and is thus likely to expose similar problems to the ones we described in the introductory section. The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged from our perspective and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the protocol. However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but it didn't fit our requirements and we decided to go for the following architecture w.r.t. to protocol-integration:
* A protocol-agnostic inner core that is extremely well-defined, well-tested and portable. * An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols.
In summary, we have not chosen Wayland/Weston as our basis for delivering a next-generation user experience as it does not fulfill our requirements completely. More to this, with our protocol- and platform-agnostic approach, we can make sure that we reach our goal of a consistent and beautiful user experience across platforms and device form factors. However, Wayland support could be added either by providing a Wayland-specific frontend implementation for our display server or by providing a client-side implementation of libwayland that ultimately talks to Mir."
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] munchor|13 years ago|reply
>This will not end well for interoperability, for developers, or for the wider Linux ecosystem. Bad times.
That comment on OMG! Ubuntu! is making me uncomfortable with the consequences this might have for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I am not sure about how far I can trust that comment, but the Phoronix article[1] explains it better:
>Canonical developers will make to see that applications relying upon Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL, etc will be able to use Mir in an "out of the box" manner. The legacy X support will come from an in-session root-less X Server.
I would, though, like to know more about the consequences for this. First of all, we know that Unity will be much faster, since this thing needs to run on phones too and Unity will actually be a "real thing" instead of just a Window Manager (Compiz) plugin.
>Isn't a point of FOSS that people can all contribute to one major project instead of reinventing the wheel?
That is another comment on OMG! Ubuntu! and I completely agree with it. Sure, freedom of choice is great, but why not use Wayland, really? It was designed from scratch to work for everybody.
[1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxN...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hazov|13 years ago|reply
http://she-devel.com/Linux_Android_Graphics_Stacks.svg
I believe Mir will just be a custom tailored SurfaceFlinger, I just do not understand why Canonical will not use SurfaceFlinger.
EDIT: Maybe because SurfaceFlinger is built with OpenGLES in mind? I don't really know.
[+] [-] sandGorgon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otterley|13 years ago|reply
If Canonical is serious about attracting mainstream Linux adoption, this is going to have to be addressed from the start.
[+] [-] prodigal_erik|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmike|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BruceIV|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crististm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gvalkov|13 years ago|reply
A lot of work has already went into wayland and in making things work with it (gtk3, qt5, clutter etc). This is truly an ambitious project and I doubt that ubuntu engineers would needlessly want to write all of this from scratch if there weren't legitimate shortcomings in wayland's architecture.
Personally, I'm looking forward to my wayland powered, fedora 20 desktop running the yet to be invented WMonad tiling window compositor.
[1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...
[+] [-] lucian1900|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hamax|13 years ago|reply
If they screw it up there are plenty distros to choose from.
[+] [-] binarycrusader|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandGorgon|13 years ago|reply
Ubuntu already has significant investment in Surfaceflinger/Android via its Touch vertical. It has also started migrating to QT/QML for its shell (which work really well on Android). There is a significant opportunity to innovate on UX (like Blackberry Z10), rather than throw away the ecosystem that would come with adopting an Android core.
Yesterday, I couldnt join a GoToMeeting using Ubuntu. But just after, I did it in less than 2 minutes by using an app oumy Android device. That is a huge ecosystem, that I want to use on my desktop (I dont know how the desktop UX for a touch app will work, but I hope it will).
I say that Ubuntu, Google and Valve should sit together and come up with a graphics+sound backend that will work together. And let me play Half Life 3 on my phone and desktop simultaneously !
[+] [-] AnthonBerg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scolex|13 years ago|reply
but then they decided to became inventors. But they don't have strong engineering background and their products were trash.
upstart never provided advanced parallelism and was surpassed by systemd
Top menu and indicators rely on d-bus -- really stupid idea and misuse of technology
they abandon mutter+clutter for closed gl-canvas rendering library + compiz to be used in unity. Now is mutter+clutter far more advanced.
Now they want to change wayland for mir? are they serious? They are not good at inventing things. They will just make linux fragmentation much worst. It's really problematic to make good drivers and gpu companies can't spend money and people on different linux platforms.
ubuntu became from "linux for human beings" to "crappy mac-os like for poor"
[+] [-] caycep|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|13 years ago|reply
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
[+] [-] desireco42|13 years ago|reply
It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows. If Ubuntu manage to pull this off, and I think they deserve all our support in that, we will get inspiration for all the open source projects as well as good codebase they can fork and work with. I am not expert in licencing, but anything they accomplish can't be bad for the open source movement.
My 2c.