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Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

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Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#82
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't Linux idiots (whatever that means) or their cautionary tendencies, it's Canonical.

Yes The linux idiots have one glaring example: PulseAudio Throw away user experience, system stability, judicious use of CPU for what? It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly , also usually consuming more CPU than flash player

> It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly, also usually consuming more CPU than flash player

You make a sweeping statement which is not true for every system. Looking at what happens playing a Youtube music video, according to htop:

- pulseaudio is using between 0 and 1% CPU

- plugin-container (wrapping Flash) is at 3%

- firefox oscillates between 20 and 40%

Now, my understanding is that, at the time pulseaudio came out, it was using untested functionalities in audio drivers which, for many chipsets, did not actually work and progressively got fixed. There was the same problem with graphics drivers when KDE 4.0 was introduced. Maybe you're out of luck and actually have a defective driver?

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#83
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes The linux idiots have one glaring example: PulseAudio Throw away user experience, system stability, judicious use of CPU for what? It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly , also usually consuming more CPU than flash player

Am I the only person in the world who has never had anything but a pleasant experience with PulseAudio? The first time I noticed that I was using it, I had already been using it for a year...

No, you're not the only one. I'd been forewarned of the awfulness of pulse, but didn't even notice its installation until later, when I discovered all the useful things I could do with it: play music over the office Apple airplay thingy; use two sets of headphones simultaneously; send audio to another computer in the house. Without any typing, searching, or rebooting,

I remember OSS and Alsa, and I don't miss either. As far as I can see, it makes Linux audio work like any other computer in this millennium.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes The linux idiots have one glaring example: PulseAudio Throw away user experience, system stability, judicious use of CPU for what? It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly , also usually consuming more CPU than flash player

> It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly, also usually consuming more CPU than flash player You make a sweeping statement which is not true for every system. Looking at what happens playing a Youtube music video, according to htop: - pulseaudio is using between 0 and 1% CPU - plugin-container (wrapping Flash) is at 3% - firefox oscillates between 20 and 40% Now, my under…

Thanks for this insightful answer

I'm not sure I have a bad driver, the last two chipsets I used were Intel (and no weird audio devices), works fine with other sw. Latest distro tested: RHEL 6 and Fedora 16

For me, PA would stay around 5%, 10% sometimes, and even more depending on the task. Not to mention crashing every week (at a random moment)

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#85
post #72
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Ubuntu's raison d'etre, which is to bring Free (libre) software to the world. Except the rest of the (consumer) world doesn't value libre as a first-class feature. They want the shiny. The way we get to bring our values to the world is to be commercially relevant. Because otherwise, hardware vendors don't care about you, ISVs ignore you, app developers target other platforms,…

Seems dishonest and manipulative to me. Con a bunch of people into adopting something that doesn't really fit their needs, is just shiny, so that you can use them as leverage... that is not something I am interested in.

Meanwhile all of those unskilled users are not without a cost. Free software support infrastructure is not set up to handle that many unskilled users. If Canonical is going to be giving all of those people 3rd party support themselves, that is all well and good, but it seems to me they tend to punt the ball.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#86
post #29

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?

Pardon my ignorance, but what is wrong with X, anyway?

http://askubuntu.com/a/11877/19466 :

X has two drawing APIs. One of these is a part of the core X11 protocol, which is ancient, useless, and nobody uses. The other is the XRender extension which provides modern composite operations, among other things such as gradients. This is what Cairo, for example, uses. X also has font drawing APIs.

http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on... :

The X11 protocol (without extensions) defines about 120 types of requests: create a window, move a window, etc.

Nowadays, there's at least 25 % of them which are useless: usage of server-side font, or the drawing of squares and polygon, are unused by any modern application or toolkit. All of this is superseded by requests from extensions, like the XRender one.

The handling of multiple monitors displays has totally been screwed up. X11 has been designed to work in Zaphod mode (independent monitors). But Xinerama, and nowadays XRandR have replaced it up: recent X servers (released after ~2007) does not support Zaphod mode anymore, even if it's a core piece of the X11 protocol.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#88
post #33

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 st…

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.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#89
post #33

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 st…

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.

My 0.02c.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes The linux idiots have one glaring example: PulseAudio Throw away user experience, system stability, judicious use of CPU for what? It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly , also usually consuming more CPU than flash player

Not this again... You could have complained about this years ago, but it makes no sense today. PulseAudio got fixed. > user experience you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI). Could you do this with ESD? Arts? Tell me about this audio streaming solution with super UX for Linux that you know...

"you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI)."

Yes, and? I understand this is a useful feature for some people, but I'm just interested in listening to music and PA does not me allow to do that without frequent crashes and bugs

I don't care about the features of a car if it stops working at random. And yes, this has happened on every distro I tried since PA started being bundled. Every single distro, every single machine I've had only a stable system with PA OFF

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