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Mir’s next steps – we need your input

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Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#31

Post by majewsky »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #27

At the very least, get Mir to the point where it's a drop-in replacement for Weston, the reference Wayland compositor. Then make whatever changes you feel like on top of that. If Mir becomes included in DE's across various distros, and if it becomes a runtime option when launching a session (in the same way that GNOME now lets you choose whether to run a Wayland or Xorg session at login), people will be able to A/B t…

I think there's some misunderstanding in your comment about how Wayland works. 99.9% of Wayland desktops out there [1] do not use Weston. Weston is not Wayland's display server, it's a reference implementation of a window manager implementing the Wayland protocol(s). There is no separation between display server and window manager in Wayland, only a single master process, the compositor, which fulfils (roughly) both these roles. So if you're running, say, KDE Plasma, then your compositor is KWin, and Weston is nowhere to be seen. If you're running Sway, then your compositor is Sway. And so on. Wayland is only a protocol, not a piece of software (unless you count the shared libraries provided by the Wayland project).

[1] Guesstimate.

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#32

Post by floatboth »

pas wrote: post #18
wmf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Weston is pretty much the reference compositor for Wayland.

I tried it. It .. does nothing. Maybe there are/were reference implementations for the protocol extensions too?

What do you mean by "nothing"? Weston includes a usable desktop shell by default. Without virtual desktops, but with a panel.

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#33

Post by majewsky »

GuiA wrote: post #24
bwat49 wrote: post #8

"This is where server/compositor/window manager and panels/docks/desktop are all in a single process." This sounds like gnome-shell, and it's atrocious. It's unresponsive and laggy under any sort of load, even the mouse cursor skips around

From "Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing" : I – Obeys operator The operator shall retain full control of the machine at all times. In particular, the handling of the keyboard, mouse, and other human interface devices must take absolute priority over all other processing. The operator shall have the ability to issue commands and receive immediate confirmation of said commands at all times, regardless of system load…

Off-topic: It's sad how far away we are from sane personal computing (if I may use these laws as a definition of that term).

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#34

Post by simion314 »

jononor wrote: post #30
simion314 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a terminal that needs to run just 1 app then why use Gnome or other DE? you would need to run a minimal display server and start that only application.

Use the Weston full-screen shell. No need to invent a new Wayland compositor for that, and certainly no reason to have multi-display-system abstraction like Mir seems to have.

You would still have to fork it though if you need to add missing things, like how now Gnome and KDE implement in different ways how to grab screenshots. The fact that smaller DEs are creating their own libraries and not use Weston indicate to me that Weston is just a playground for Wayland where they test their ideas and experiment and it is not designed to be used or extended, I may be wrong though, there are some blog posts from the authors of Sway and others that work on adding Wayland support to different DEs. Why do you think Sway, Gnome, KDE and others can implement what they want but Canonical or volunteers can implement wayland on top of Mir but have to use Weston or Mutter ? Do you think everyone should Weston or Mutter?

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#35

Post by wmf »

folknor wrote: post #29
wmf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Mir offer compared to Weston? It still sounds pretty NIH.

I don't think the guy who posted this works for Canonical at the moment. If he does, his launchpad page is very sparse compared to other employees. I'm not saying that to disparage him in any way, but because it would make it incompatible with a not-invented-here syndrome. I think Mir should be looked at as an independent project now. I might be wrong, of course, but that's the impression I have. https://github.com/M…

Even given that Mir is independent, it sounds like people are continuing to work on it because they have already invested in working on it. I've yet to hear of any users.

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#36

Post by eecc »

:’’( the Linux Desktop tragedy continues... umpteenth reimplementation, failure to address total train wrecks like d-bus and systemd because politics... and the realization that Windows has probably become a more secure environment... and Apple refusing to build decent hardware. Wake me up

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#37

Post by vetinari »

eecc wrote: post #36

:’’( the Linux Desktop tragedy continues... umpteenth reimplementation, failure to address total train wrecks like d-bus and systemd because politics... and the realization that Windows has probably become a more secure environment... and Apple refusing to build decent hardware. Wake me up

Systemd is one of these things that brings many improvements... and gets talked down.

If it was at least criticized constructively, but no, it is something else than the "traditional" init, so let's just berate it.

And then we wonder, why the Linux desktop is always out of reach, when we dismiss anything, that helps to drag Linux out of the maze of one-off bash and perl scripts.

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#38

Post by eecc »

vetinari wrote: post #37
eecc wrote: post #36

:’’( the Linux Desktop tragedy continues... umpteenth reimplementation, failure to address total train wrecks like d-bus and systemd because politics... and the realization that Windows has probably become a more secure environment... and Apple refusing to build decent hardware. Wake me up

Systemd is one of these things that brings many improvements... and gets talked down. If it was at least criticized constructively, but no, it is something else than the "traditional" init, so let's just berate it. And then we wonder, why the Linux desktop is always out of reach, when we dismiss anything, that helps to drag Linux out of the maze of one-off bash and perl scripts.

No. I’m no init fanboy, I’d have just adopted Apple’s launchd and called it a day. No, criticisms of systemd are plenty and well argumented, and yet get systematically talked down. First that comes to mind is the cavalier reaction to leaving some firmware fs mounted rw because systemd used it during reboot; didn’t matter uncautios mishaps could brick a device, team just won’t-fix’d the report and called everyone else an idiot. Doesn’t work like that

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#39

Post by folknor »

wmf wrote: post #35
folknor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the guy who posted this works for Canonical at the moment. If he does, his launchpad page is very sparse compared to other employees. I'm not saying that to disparage him in any way, but because it would make it incompatible with a not-invented-here syndrome. I think Mir should be looked at as an independent project now. I might be wrong, of course, but that's the impression I have. https://github.com/M…

Even given that Mir is independent, it sounds like people are continuing to work on it because they have already invested in working on it. I've yet to hear of any users.

I agree, I'm not saying it's useful in a sense other than academic/historic. I was only reacting to "NIH". I guess you might be arguing that Mir continues as a consequence of nostalgia from an original not-invented-here syndrome.

I won't argue with that :-P

That said, if the guy who posted this is not employed by Canonical (like I speculated), and has _never_ been employed by Canonical, I would like to further speculate that either (a) he's doing this in order to specifically gain favor with Canonical employees and increase his chances of employment there later, or (b) to increase his chances of employment at any of the "big Linux players", or (c) to increase his knowledge of the X/wayland ecosystem and C coding in general.

All of which sound like good investments on his part.

Anyway that's speculation upon speculation, obviously, but if I was a professor at a generic I.T. bachelor/masters, this is exactly what I'd tell my students to do in their spare time (and if they could weave it into related classwork, all the better obviously).

Re: Mir’s next steps – we need your input

#40

Post by erikpukinskis »

pas wrote: post #10

So X was horrible, because it is very old and blablabla, and Wayland the protocol got finalized without an actual implementation that people use in good old design by committee fashion (no?), and for some reason now everybody writes compositors instead of writing one for Linux in general... I don't really understand why, can someone explain? (I mean, I know about how Mir seemed to be regular Canonical NIH symptom, bu…

> So X was horrible

Was it?

I feel like someday someone is going to say something like "Man our VR world syncing protocol is really heavy, and we end up needing AGI-level LOD prediction to do it well, but compressing 360 degree light fields is wasteful and leads to latency artifacts... what if there was a protocol that allowed realities to render display-space fields directly to remote devices, but do the final compositing on the client?" and then someone will discover the X protocol, re-implement it with 3D SDFs instead of 2D rectangles, and all of the sudden X will be the new hot thing.

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