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

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#321

Post by mindcrime » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 4:23 PM UTC

ashayh wrote: post #212

raverbashing wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nonsense. Fedora is a fine desktop Linux... I run it on a woefully underpowered laptop which I use for development, and it is every bit as usable as, say, Ubuntu (which I use on my corporate laptop). In fact, I'd take my Fedora/KDE setup over this Ubuntu/Unity setup any day.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#322

Post by tedks » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 4:37 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #316

riotingpscifis wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Replace GPL code with BSD code 2) Release a subset of the features to open source community Why would Apple be so allergic to GPL unless they want the ability to close stuff? If really you think Apple would stay open if they dominated the market look at the iPhone.

This is only "hurting free software" if you are a complete radical like rms, who believes that any closed source software is an affront to humanity, blah, blah. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what Apple closes, as everything that was Free before, is still Free afterwards. If you don't like Apple's stuff, fork it. If you don't like closed source software, don't use it. I don't see anybody putting a gun to anyone's head…

This is a shallow view of the situation.

Your metric is essentially "no knowledge is lost from the Free world." However, this means that all free software developers could die tomorrow and your metric would be satisfied.

A better metric is "the most free software that could be made is made." Switching from a GPLd compiler platform to a non-copyleft "freemium" Apple platform is worse for this.

If you don't care about free software as a political goal, there is no purpose to have this discussion in the first place, as you don't care about free software being hurt.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#323

Post by HerraBRE » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 4:47 PM UTC

phaemon wrote: post #314

vor_ wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be complaining if they contributing nothing. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

He said they weren't doing enough. You're pointing out he'd also complain if they did even less . Seriously?

Actually, I was just pointing out that they are not open in any meaningful sense of the word - their products are very, very closed and controlling and that's how they like it. Comparing them to Canonical is in my opinion very silly for that reason, it's apples to oranges.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#324

Post by mindcrime » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 5:37 PM UTC

tedks wrote: post #322

mindcrime wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only "hurting free software" if you are a complete radical like rms, who believes that any closed source software is an affront to humanity, blah, blah. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what Apple closes, as everything that was Free before, is still Free afterwards. If you don't like Apple's stuff, fork it. If you don't like closed source software, don't use it. I don't see anybody putting a gun to anyone's head…

This is a shallow view of the situation. Your metric is essentially "no knowledge is lost from the Free world." However, this means that all free software developers could die tomorrow and your metric would be satisfied. A better metric is "the most free software that could be made is made." Switching from a GPLd compiler platform to a non-copyleft "freemium" Apple platform is worse for this. If you don't care about…

I think you're setting up a false dichotomy here. "You care" or "you don't care". Reality is more nuanced than that. Also, the idea of "all free software developers dying tomorrow' is just hyperbole, since the chances of that happening are essentially nil.

Yes, we'd all like to maximize the amount of F/OSS software in the world. F/OSS is a Good Thing, and I founded a company based around F/OSS for a reason. But it's not this horrible tragedy / affront to humanity, if Apple (or whoever) takes a step away from a purist "Free" software position.

To put it another way: no one owes you (or me, or anybody else) a world full of all the Free software we want. And even more so when plenty of people in the world don't care about software freedom. As long as those of us who do care have the option to fork and continue development of projects, then the actual freedom remains, as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#325

Post by takluyver » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 6:10 PM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #58

takluyver wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically: I want to be using a system that I can be confident has good hardware & software support, not always double checking everything I buy to make sure it will work. That means getting at least a few % market share so that other companies take it seriously. There's also an ideological angle: many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open s…

> not always double checking everything I buy to make sure it will work. I feel like we've been there since... 2007? My last several purchases were made with zero caution or research anyway, maybe I've just been getting lucky. > many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open source operating system. That's fine and all, I don't buy into that ideol…

The hardware situation has got much better, but there are still some problems. Laptops with both integrated and separate GPUs aren't very well supported (so I hear, I don't have one). There's a relatively new scanner in my office that's not supported by SANE. I wanted an external wifi adapter for a desktop recently, and I'm not sure how many will just work with Linux.

On the software side, Steam got ported recently, but there's plenty of other software that we'd like to see. Flash is no longer released for Linux, although for now at least I can still watch iPlayer with the last version of Flash that was released. Hopefully HTML5 will have killed it before much longer.

Of course we shouldn't pretend that Linux is something that it isn't. If it's not good enough, we aim to improve it. But I honestly think that, if non-technical users got something like Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed on compatible hardware, it would work perfectly well... except for the expectation, both from users and app developers, that everyone has Windows. Which brings me back to the point about market share.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#326

Post by mnazim » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

snogglethorpe wrote: post #317

McP wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Link please

https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...

Supporting parts of subversion client is not same as subversion repository.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#327

Post by tzs » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 6:53 PM UTC

tedks wrote: post #278

tzs wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC Definitely and only? How did you determine this?

It's sort of obvious? I can't see any other reason Apple would have for it, other than making compilers researchers have slightly easier lives. It'd certainly make sense after they were forced to open source the frontend for Objective-C.

Apple had two technical needs that GCC could not reasonably satisfy. One was to compile Core Image filters. When you make a chain of filters, they treat it as a single complicated filter which they JIT compile and optimize for your GPU or CPU (I believe they decide at run time which to target based on what will be best for the particular complex filter you have defined).

Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers.

Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#328

Post by mattkevan » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 6:59 PM UTC

sixbrx wrote: post #311

mattkevan wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something? Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots. Wow. The level of arrogance and elitism on display here is breathtaking. This is why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. Not the fact that it's incompatible with most mainstream software, not the fact that it's low profile or the fact that most Linux desktops look and f…

> Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing things down. Except in practice, it almost always seems to. Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.

> Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.

That's about picking the right tool for the job, not dumbing down.

It's like complaining that a trowel is a dumbed down shovelling device because it can't make any significant headway with digging a massive trench.

That said, I develop Drupal sites locally on my jailbroken iPad and it's pretty nifty to have access to a full development environment on something that portable.

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#329

Post by jlgreco » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 7:08 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #269

jlgreco wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have missed the point. Show me the Android equivalent of Debian. Show me an Android project, with all of the unskilled users that come with it, that is anywhere near as organized as the Debian Project. Show me that legions of unskilled users have allowed this Android project to achieve hardware compatibility at all comparable to what Debian achieves on the desktop. Such a project does not exist . I assert that it…

>Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots. implying Firefox and Chrome will rot.

Firefox and Chrome have backing organizations that are willing to not rely on community support.

(And frankly, I would argue that Firefox has been rotting for years now, though likely for unrelated reasons.)

Re: Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir

#330

Post by jlgreco » Tue, Mar 05, 2013, 7:12 PM UTC

mattkevan wrote: post #308

jlgreco wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have missed the point. Show me the Android equivalent of Debian. Show me an Android project, with all of the unskilled users that come with it, that is anywhere near as organized as the Debian Project. Show me that legions of unskilled users have allowed this Android project to achieve hardware compatibility at all comparable to what Debian achieves on the desktop. Such a project does not exist . I assert that it…

Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something? Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots. Wow. The level of arrogance and elitism on display here is breathtaking. This is why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. Not the fact that it's incompatible with most mainstream software, not the fact that it's low profile or the fact that most Linux desktops look and f…

Arrogance or not, the fact remains that community developed Android distributions have all the unskilled users Ubuntu could ever dream of having, yet the projects are even worse.

Projects that rely on community support simply cannot handle the load. It is a failing of community driven open source to be sure, it would be great if it were otherwise, but I simply see absolutely no reason to think it is not reality. Your theory is nice, and it would be nice if it were reality, but it does not fit the data.