Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

wiki.ubuntu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 346 posts

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#211

Post by adeaver »

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…

On the one hand those standards came from somewhere, and that somewhere is likely someone else forking an existing project and making changes to it.

On the other hand, adhering to standards that are years old isn't a great way to advance. Standards have to grow and adapt and, wait for it, change.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#212

Post by ashayh »

raverbashing wrote: post #84
mercurial wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

You should avoid RH based distros for Desktop related activities. Perhaps you should try Ubuntu, Mint or Suse.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#214

Post by dakimov »

The worst thing is using C++ for a GUI engine. Don't do that mistake again!

The code looks quite weak at the first glance, but at least not so ugly as average open-source code.

The architecture solutions seem a bit weak too, even weaker than a GUI engine I have written being a junior developer.

Overall, their code seems to be written by a junior developer.

Seems to be too ambitious so far.

The problem is that it is actually really hard to make a proper GUI engine. It requires enormous experience and amount of expertise, like you can come up with something decent after building a few your own engines and closely analyzing existing solutions.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#215

Post by Someone »

Anybody know what this will be licensed under? I would think (L)GPL, but https://launchpad.net/mir isn't clear:

   "Licences:
    GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source
   (Boost Software License - Version 1.0)
    Commercial subscription expires 2022-09-24
    This project’s licence has not been reviewed."

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#216

Post by joseph_cooney »

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…

re: Unity - agree. Although I was initially skeptical, now I like it, and it makes more sense in the context of ubuntu on tablets.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#217

Post by VLM »

achiang wrote: post #72
jlgreco wrote: 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,…

"This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Ubuntu's raison d'etre, which is to bring Free (libre) software to the world."

Here's my marketing campaign, sad as it is, its the best possible spin:

"Hey world, I've got something new for you, its incompatible with everything and doesn't work with anything and can't actually do anything you want, but, hey, its new so it must be better and it does a bunch of stuff that nobody outside the dev community cares about. Oh and we "had" to take some stuff away like network transparency which is awesome, err, I mean ignore the man behind the curtain and someday VNC might work, oh and every dev who's finally gotten used to the existing weird design will have to retrain. Other than that trust me its awesome you better switch now. And by switch, I really mean it since it'll be incompatible with everything else ever written." How could anyone not drop their entire legacy installed base of hardware and software and training and switch, I mean its got transparent animated dancing robots which no one can do without, and its got electrolytes that plants crave!

I'm sorry I just can't do any better given bad news.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#218

Post by trotsky »

Did I read that correctly, there is no plan to build GTK+ bindings - they are going to qt based dekstop applications?

Or do they expect gnome to port to mir? Unless they already worked that out it doesn't seem too likely as this amounts to a direct shot at them.

If Ubuntu is suddenly not going to have any gtk applications available it is going to be a very foreign environment to lots of its current users.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#220

Post by achiang »

jlgreco wrote: post #176
achiang wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You keep putting up strawmen.

Show me the desktop Linux equivalent of Android, not Cyanogenmod. It doesn't exist - and you can measure that failure with any number of metrics.

If Ubuntu can achieve that type of success and protect the freedom of users with the GPL (instead of the permissive BSD model for hardware makers) then we will have accomplished something in the world.

Post reply on HN