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Canonical Announces Mir: A New Display Server Not On X11 Or Wayland
An anonymous reader writes "On the Ubuntu Wiki is now the Mir specification, which is a next-generation display server not based on X11/X.Org or Wayland. Canonical is rolling their own display server for future releases of Ubuntu for form factors from mobile phones to the desktop. Mir is still in development but is said to support Android graphics drivers, open-source Linux graphics drivers, and they're pressuring hardware vendors with commercial closed-source drivers to support it too. They also said X11 apps will be compatible along with GTK3 and Qt/QML programs. Canonical isn't using X11 or Wayland with their future Unity desktop as they see many shortcomings from these existing and commonly used components."
Seriously? Can't leave it well enough alone? Can't even focus your energy on one replacement, you want to work on another too?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Unless they can convince the wider Linux community to adopt some of their technologies, Canonical is basically going to end up forking the platform. If that happens, it will be a fairly major step backwards for Linux on the desktop since developers will be on the hook to adjust to supporting not just multiple packaging systems and multiple library versions, but also multiple incompatible core system API's. Essentially Ubuntu will no longer be "Linux" in any way that matters to developers and all the support for Linux out there now will either die or just switch over to being Ubuntu specific and I don't see how that benefits anyone in the community.
I think Shuttleworth has just decided (probably correctly) that he can't make any money on the desktop, but mobile is still a possibility. The Unity interface and now this are an attempt to compete with Android.
I abandoned Ubuntu for my desktop when Unity came, but I think I might actually like it on a tablet or phone. Anyway, I'll try to keep an open mind when the devices actually come out. I hope one of non-Android Linux phone efforts finds a niche, whether it's Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen, or Firefox OS. If Shuttleworth can pull it off, then more power to him.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I really don't have the technical knowledge to praise or damn the idea, but as I understand it, there are some clever moves in this;
It appears that they rip out enough of Android that they can use the Android graphic drivers for Mir, so that every device with android drivers delivers "free" drivers for Mir too. That would give them a huge advantage in the Smartphone and Tablet arena.
QtMir, QtUbuntu, Qt/QML; it looks like Ubuntu dumps Gnome/GTK in favour of Qt5 for core OS (GUI) development. As I see it they will clone KDE/Qt, substituting the KDE parts with QtUbuntu.
Their time line seems very optimistic though.
I think Shuttleworth has just decided (probably correctly) that he can't make any money on the desktop, but mobile is still a possibility.
It is highly doubtful that he can make any money in the mobile sphere, that is pretty well decided now, too. He probably stood a better chance with the desktop, particularly after Windows 8.
The Unity interface and now this are an attempt to compete with Android.
If the goal was to compete with android, they should have gone KDE. KDE active is a much more attractive development environment and much further along than Ubuntu's mobile offerings, which don't even use the standard Unity interface.
I abandoned Ubuntu for my desktop when Unity came, but I think I might actually like it on a tablet or phone. Anyway, I'll try to keep an open mind when the devices actually come out. I hope one of non-Android Linux phone efforts finds a niche, whether it's Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen, or Firefox OS. If Shuttleworth can pull it off, then more power to him.
Study after study shows that Unity does not work well on a tablet/touch device. It only looks like it should work, but all of the apps are mouse centric. The problem for Canonical going mobile is that most of the apps in their repositories, which is a large selling point (even if free), won't work on mobile. So from the very start, they will be competing with Apple and Android who have a huge head start and even Microsoft who while a very distant third is lightyears ahead of Canonical.
As I said earlier, they should have gone Plasma Active. If all of the resources that they dumped into Unity and now their mobile offerings had been used to further that project, they would have been to market earlier and had apps ready to deploy. Instead they chose to go their own way, which is their right, but not necessarily the wisest business decision as even Microsoft is late to the game.
I understand the desire to replace X.
It's the desire to trash everything and start again, but this time doint it *right*.
Big chunks of X either aren't needed any more or have moved into other locations (mostly the kernel).
Yes and no. Mostly no.
For better or worse, quite a bit of the hardware side has moved into the kernel.
The other bits (old-style graphics and font rendering) is no longer big. It was big in 1987, but by 2013 standards it's a few k, perhaps even a few M of memory. Utterly irrelevant.
The other parts of X work really pretty well.
Sure there are warts. But the better solution is not to nuke it from orbit, it's to come up with protocol fixes to give thigs like persistence and fewer round trips (e.g. like NX). The trouble with nuking things is that all the edge and corner and even marginally non mainsream cases just get thrown away too.
X does a lot of things well, and large parts of the protocol have aged very gracefully. Did you know that copy/paste with advanced (non text) types and drag and drop is all implemented using mechanisms compatible with the original 1987 X protocol?
Oh, and you can pry my server side decorations from my cold, dead hads :)
Also what moron on the X team got rid of the keycombo to nuke server grabs for misbehaving applications? I think the reasoning was that it shouldn't be necessary because that's an application bug and should never happen. No shit it's a bug, sherlock! Now these monkeys are trying to give us the next great compositor.
Basically they have no respect for the user.
SJW n. One who posts facts.