Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#141

Post by rrouse » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

dspeyer wrote: post #121

kunai wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 slightl…

Slightly more open? In what way is Ubuntu closed?

They are not talking about Ubuntu being closed. They are saying that Ubuntu would drift toward being more like Mac OS X, but be more open than Apple is with Mac OS X.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#142

Post by elteto » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

Wow. The sheer level of FUD and negativity that you can find on these comments is just mind blowing. It seems that most of it (with a few knowledgeable exceptions) is coming from folks who don't know what they are talking about and have never probably developed graphical applications for Linux. They can't elaborate a single technical reason as to why they dislike whatever it is they dislike, yet they still jump on the bashing theme du jour (which nowadays seems to be Canonical).

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#143

Post by achiang » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:29 PM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #85

achiang wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

The entire reason why desktop Linux has been a failure is exactly because it does not fit the needs of most people. And for that audience, "shiny" is equally important as "featureful".

In the modern marketplace, you can't choose either/or. It has to be both.

Ubuntu wants to do both and additionally add libre.

The strawman fallacy you inferred from my statement has the additional fallacy of incorrect causality.

People are initially attracted to Ubuntu for a variety of reasons, and we hope to keep them because we are fit for purpose, not for whatever ideological reason or niche feature, and certainly not due to any sort of con job.

Desktop Ubuntu has failed to reach that critical mass of users to be taken seriously by industry (our good friends at Valve notwithstanding), and the only logical place to jumpstart the install base is the mobile world.

The mobile market is brutally competitive. Ubuntu will succeed or fail on its own merits, not because of any dishonest manipulation of innocent users.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#144

Post by mtgx » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:30 PM UTC

It seems they are rewriting Unity, which I think is great. Unity is too slow. It should never be used for mobile devices as it is.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#145

Post by noselasd » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:30 PM UTC

hazov wrote: post #48

kunai wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 slightl…

Which standards are these? Besides using the kernel compiled with gcc and using dynamic linked ELF binaries as their default and a libc on the system the only standard that I ever knew of was LSB, which I believe does not include anything about graphics (I can be wrong).

They're defacto standards. Not formal standards. The fact that you can compile and run a GTK program that will run on most linux and even other unix like systems without problem.

It means that someone creating a program, proprietary or open source, can, with little effort run that program on most linux distros. We have quite a handful of internal GUI tools, some use Qt, some use GTK, written in python and some in C or C++. The GUI stack makes up the biggest stack here, but they use a few other libs as well, e.g. cURL, openssl, gsl.

All these are readily available, and we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD beacuse of the defacto "standards" provided by these environments. Even porting these (at least some of them) to windows, where many of these libraries are available would take too much time because of minute details - there's other real problems we need to focus on. We hope we still can run these programs on Ubuntu in the future though, but it will not take that much to make it infeasible

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#146

Post by vidarh » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:32 PM UTC

hmo09 wrote: post #14

pilgrim689 wrote: post #10

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, an…

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…

> Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view

Has it? Do you have numbers?

Because I see a small number of people who complain very loudly, and often make sweeping claims about how unpopular it is without any evidence, who always get followed by responses from people (like me) who love it...

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#147

Post by shmerl » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:33 PM UTC

oneweekwonder wrote: post #138

shmerl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What worries me is fragmentation of drivers. It can be a very serious problem. Possible scenario: Nvidia wait for broader Wayland adoption to release their driver for Wayland. Comes along Canonical and drops Mir on our heads. Nvidia scratch their heads and say - forget Wayland. Not sure if they'll say forget Mir as well - they have better things to do than to deal with this mess, but all this doesn't sound good alrea…

I don't take the driver situation into consideration and it seems that Ubuntu is contacting closed source manufactures to allow driver support for mir. I like your scenario because I believe a interesting element is that Valve is trying to port most of its Steam games to Ubuntu and they do have muscle with Nvidia and AMD. And with the rumours that the steambox called Piston would be based on Ubuntu. So in my opinion…

I don't consider Ubuntu usurping the focus of game development and drivers a good thing. And notion like "using Mir - good for you, not using Mir - too bad, no drivers" doesn't sound good as well.

Ubuntu is already quite isolationist. This will only make matters worse.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#148

Post by iso-8859-1 » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:37 PM UTC

mercurial wrote: post #133

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Parent seems to have been experimenting this issue recently. Saying "PulseAudio got fixed" does not mean "it works perfectly for everybody" (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=813407 ). Most people will care more about getting a sound system which works without crashing and not sucking up CPU before getting sound system with streaming. The fact that you and me have had a good experience with it does not…

That's a Fedora bug. It wouldn't be bleeding-edge (enough!) if it didn't crash. Running Fedora and complaining in a public forum about crashes (without saying the distribution name in the first place!) makes no sense to me.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#149

Post by zanny » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:38 PM UTC

munchor wrote: post #2

>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 u…

I'm personally not too worried here. The thing is both Wayland and Mir will be able to run X on top of them, so currently all available GUI programs will still work.

What matters is the "winner". They will both hit mainstream usage, we will see which one is easier to develop for, and that one will take off. If Mir's claims of fixing input / specialization issues in Wayland comes to fruition, then it will probably win. If Mir hits like Unity, or atrophies like Upstart, then Wayland will probably win.

The problem is his Wayland fails everyone can switch to Mir. If Mir proves weaker, we are stuck with a more fragmented desktop space because Canonical doesn't change their minds on these things.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#150

Post by zanny » Mon, Mar 04, 2013, 8:40 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #144

It seems they are rewriting Unity, which I think is great. Unity is too slow. It should never be used for mobile devices as it is. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityNextSpec

What I don't get is why Canonical doesn't just implement Unity as a Kwin frontend if they are rewriting it. They obviously know Compiz has no support anymore, and if they are switching the bulk of their projects to qt, it seems like they have a compositor just kind of sitting there waiting to be adopted.