More From Canonical Employee On: "Why Mir?"

An anonymous reader writes "Canonical Desktop and Mobile Engineer Christopher Halse Rogers explains in more detail the decision for Mir as apposed to Wayland. Although Halse Rogers 'was not involved in the original decision to create Mir,' he's had 'discussions with those who were.' 'We want something like Wayland, but different in almost all the details.' 'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.' In a separate post Halse Rogers answer the question: Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"

Comments

"apposed?"

[logjon]

Really? Are we not even going to try to pretend to give a shit anymore?

Re:Context please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your assertion that Wayland will not go anywhere seems to be predicated on the incorrect assumptions that Wayland is born of naïvety (it's not; it's developed by people with a LOT of real experience working on the current X-centric stack), and that it needs to entirely supplant X to succeed (it doesn't; it deliberately does a lot less, and it can host a rootless X server, and indeed this is the only realistic use case for it on regular desktop distributions for the next couple of years).

Yes, there are many projects that are started for the reasons you describe, and go on to fail for those same reasons. But Wayland is not one of them. That is not to say that its success is guaranteed—but rather only that your reasons to assume its failure is inevitable are invalid.

Wayland does not need to destroy decades of compatibility. In fact, its approach is quite the opposite: to maximize compatibility initially (pass almost everything through to a rootless X server with XWayland if you want), and then offer an optional smooth migration path away from X for applications that don't need its complexity, would like to push the complexity into separate components, or would like to take advantage of some of the things that you simply can't achieve with X today, e.g., flicker-free from boot, to playing a game, and then on to playing hardware-accelerated videos.

You concede that the current state of video drivers being too tightly tied to X is terrible, so I assume you agree that the work has to be done to resolve that at some point, whatever path we collectively take. That also happens to be the only thing I'm aware of that's really holding Wayland back from mainstream use today. Everything else is just little bits and pieces that need to be finished or polished up, and then it could be dropped in to real general purpose distros.

Re:This just proves it's NIH

[serviscope_minor]

Wayland is being developed by the same people behind X.org.

So? Xorg is boring. It doesn't need to change all that fast. It's not new and interesting. Careful improvements is far less funt than nuking it and starting again. Just because they develop Xorg doesn't mean they're not hopelessly biased for other reasons.

99.9% of the people lambasting Wayland have no idea what it is, what it's going to accomplish or how entrenched it already is.

Then enilghten us.

Wayland is the future.

I hope not.

It will take some time to get everything in place but it's already in play and many other project from the kernel to window managers are already moving towards implementing the plumbing necessary.

WTF? You really have no clue. The kernel side stuff is just for graphics and works as well with X11 as anything else. Secondly for "plumbing" there is no plu8mbing for window managers. WMs are replaced entirely by the compositor. None of the X11 WMs will work. It's a completely different architecture.

Given this is slashdot I'm not particularly surprised by the ignorance,

Is the irony intended.

nor am I surprised that no one has bothered to actually learn about wayland and what it is but frankly the hatred is a bit surprising given the total ignorance. People hate software they know nothing about because they are afraid of change, it's just silly.

Change is not always good, especially when it's for the better. Wayland looses us network transparency. So far all the counters to this tell me that (a) I'm lieing and I don't really want it (b) it can be hacked on after a la VNC and (c) it can be hacked on at the toolkit level providing a delightful level of inconsistency.

Those are not good arguments. (a) is particularly insulting.

You think they would at least try to learn what it is given that almost all the people behind it are the same people behind X.org.

And these are the user-hostile numpties who have come up with some really dubious decisions of late.

For instance, nixing the "kill active grab" keystroke, because it shouldn't be needed because it's caused by buggy programs. I mean WTF? How is that any comfort when some buggy program locks up the X server again and I have to switch to a console and try to kill it (if I can even find which one).

And they've decided that the Wayland policy is to have client side decorations "because it will allow consistend window decorations". The last point is an outright lie---it cannot be explained by incompetence. So in addition to having inconsistent decorations (from each toolkit, unlike now), hung windows will be immovable.

But that's OK because that's an application bug and apparently those don't ever happen. Especially not to developers.

Oh and then there's the persistent lie about X11 on Wayland. It's a lie because it's a half truth intended to decieve which probably makes it even worse. Of course you can run X11 on it. You can run X11 on a dead mouse, OS9/8/7/6 OSX, Win95, DOS Win 3.11 and modern Windows. That doesn't mean the user experience will be integrated and it doesn't mean that thw Wayland programs get the same advantages.

I wouldn't mind Wayland nearly so much if the creators (who also apparently had a lot to do with X) weren't such blantant FUD machines. If they're demonstrably lieing about a system they know in detail then it gives the feeling that they're really messing things up.

That and they've taken a really user hostile turn recently.

The thing is, thatWayland could be quite useful for multiplexing consoles and X11 sessions (if you care about graphical transitions between them, which I manifestly do not). But it's being sold very forcefully as a replacement general windowing system and due to the design lacks a number of really important feautres. If I have to choose between fancy transitions to ctrl+alt+f1 and remote windowing, I and many other slashdotters would choose the latter in a heartbeat.

And that is why there is so much hate for Wayland here: it's been earned.