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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

#171

Post by 0x09 »

oneweekwonder wrote: post #100
0x09 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are probably three obvious reasons. 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 t…

1 ) I was also under that impression, but coming to think about it who created that expectation, the community or Canonical? I don't know. 2) Calling unity a fiasco, is like calling it a failure. Which I believe is simply not true. Yes some people didn't like it and moved on or made their opinions heard on forums etc. But Canonical has a plan with Unity, and at the end of the day it gives a better user experience to…

> Calling unity a fiasco, is like calling it a failure.

This has gotten singled out so I'd better say that I meant to find a more polite way of saying "shitstorm". It's not a judgement on Unity itself, but I think it's fair to call the reaction at the time a fiasco.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#172

Post by dspeyer »

rrouse wrote: post #141
dspeyer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They said "slightly".

OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#173

Post by runeks »

oneweekwonder wrote: post #100
0x09 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are probably three obvious reasons. 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 t…

1 ) I was also under that impression, but coming to think about it who created that expectation, the community or Canonical? I don't know. 2) Calling unity a fiasco, is like calling it a failure. Which I believe is simply not true. Yes some people didn't like it and moved on or made their opinions heard on forums etc. But Canonical has a plan with Unity, and at the end of the day it gives a better user experience to…

> 1 ) I was also under that impression, but coming to think about it who created that expectation, the community or Canonical? I don't know.

Mark Shuttleworth created that expectation, when he made a blog post saying Unity would be switching to Wayland: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#174

Post by prodigal_erik »

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.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#175

Post by keithpeter »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #63
dfc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not Debian?

+1; this was my thought as well. The problem, though, is that I can no longer say to people, "you should try Linux! Ubuntu is predictable, stable, and easy to use." I don't know if Debian has a similarly friendly desktop distribution, but unless they do, I'll now point people to Linux Mint. Granted... I think this has been a better choice since Unity came into the big picture, not because it's bad, but because it's u…

"I don't know if Debian has a similarly friendly desktop distribution"

Debian Wheezy (currently testing but which will be the stable release soonish) provides Gnome 3.4 desktop but with the options of xfce4, KDE and lxde. A recent install using defaults onto a low spec netbook was basically easy. See

http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux_debian-wheezy-instal...

When Wheezy goes stable there will be live images which can be installed from.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#176

Post by jlgreco »

achiang wrote: post #143
jlgreco wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has desktop Linux been a failure? By what measure, adoption of people who are not in it's niche market? Would it stop being a "failure" if we got a bunch of laymen using it?

Compare community desktop linux distros with community distros of something more oriented towards the masses... say.. Android.

The Debian Project is a well oiled machine, coherent and consistent. Everything has a well defined process. Technically capable users don't have to sort through piles of crap to get work done.

Cyanogenmod on the other hand is an utter shitfest. Standard operating procedure there is wading through clusterfucked forums looking for undocumented unofficial fixes (in prebuild binaries mind, no source) in threads thousands of posts long filled with idiots saying "hurr durr, I dropped my phone in the toilet, now this patch doesn't work". They cannot handle the size of their technologically illiterate community, and everyone attempting to use their software, technical or otherwise, suffers as a result. (This isn't even touching the issue of shittier hardware support than you would ever expect to see with desktop linux...)

If piles of unwashed masses were really what desktop Linux is "missing", then community maintained Android distributions should, far from being a nightmare, be the promised land. This is plainly not the case.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#177

Post by obviouslygreen »

keithpeter wrote: post #175
obviouslygreen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1; this was my thought as well. The problem, though, is that I can no longer say to people, "you should try Linux! Ubuntu is predictable, stable, and easy to use." I don't know if Debian has a similarly friendly desktop distribution, but unless they do, I'll now point people to Linux Mint. Granted... I think this has been a better choice since Unity came into the big picture, not because it's bad, but because it's u…

" I don't know if Debian has a similarly friendly desktop distribution " Debian Wheezy (currently testing but which will be the stable release soonish) provides Gnome 3.4 desktop but with the options of xfce4, KDE and lxde. A recent install using defaults onto a low spec netbook was basically easy. See http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux_debian-wheezy-instal... When Wheezy goes stable there will be live images wh…

Thanks; I'm aware of Debian's release cycle, but am not entirely sure how "non-Linux-person-friendly" the stable release is. Which is my own fault, since I've settled for Ubuntu for so long.

It's great to hear it installs well on netbooks! I'm typing this on an Ubuntu Aspire One, though I always use OpenBox to replace whatever Ubuntu comes with since I'm comfortable with it. Will definitely check out Debian stable as an alternative (which is a bit funny coming from Ubuntu... an alternative to an alternative).

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#178

Post by runeks »

crististm wrote: post #52
BruceIV wrote: 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?

Here's a good video explaining some of X's problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

Long story short: the X11 protocol (which Xorg/X is an implementation of) was created in 1980, and was made for drawing stuff like this: http://xawm.sourceforge.net/Xaw.gif

The important distinction between X and any modern display server is that nowadays we separate compositor (that which composites application content into what you see on the display) and toolkit (that which draws text boxes, buttons, progress bars etc.) into two. X was designed to do both these things. This isn't practical for several reasons. So far people have worked around this issue, but many feel it's time to stop working around it (since the X codebase is a complete mess due to this "working around"), and develop something from scratch that does what we want for a modern desktop in 2013.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#179

Post by gvalkov »

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.

[1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#180

Post by zem »

kunai wrote: post #39
acabal wrote: 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…

> 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…

how is it "slightly more open"? from what i can see, all the code in ubuntu is open-source to the fullest extent of any accepted definition out there, including the full freedom to fork and start a distro that pulls from both ubuntu and third-party patches if you feel that canonical is not accepting said third-party patches readily enough.
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