Xfce, LXDE, GNOME3 Desktops Running On Ubuntu Mir Via XMir

An anonymous reader writes "Through the use of XMir, a translation layer for running legacy X11 applications atop Ubuntu's forthcoming Mir display server, the GNOME Shell, Xfce, and LXDE desktops now run on this X.Org Server alternative. With XMir, the traditional window managers are still running while Mir treats these desktops as a single window."

Comments

FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Get a life.If you understand the title of this story, I'm pretty sure you've never had sex.

Re:FOSS overload

[ButchDeLoria]

gr8 b8 m8

Re:FOSS overload

[flimflammer]

Cool

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

You understood it. Nowhere in the title or summary does it say anything about FOSS.

Re:FOSS overload

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Truth. He is indeed a master baiter.

Re:FOSS overload

[Tough Love]

If you understand the title of this story, I'm pretty sure you've never had sex.

I understand the title and I am quite sure that I get more sex than you do.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

All the software mentioned is FOSS.

Re:FOSS overload

[clarkn0va]

d8 m8 s8 gr8 (with apologies to Wayne White)

Re:FOSS overload

[socceroos]

I remember my little brother's class was discussing something topical one day, and after getting excited about the subject my little brother was begging the teacher if he and all his class mates could "have a mass debate over the issue"....in all seriousness. Such a cute, innocent kid (about 13/14 yro at the time). The teacher, after desperately trying to hold it in, exploded in laughter. Good times.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Had sex once.  Got bored halfway through.  Went back to my Linux box.  Much more interesting than trying to find nontrivial words in a language with only two words, In and Out, and one form of punctuation.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Follow the thread man. Follow the thread.

Re: FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand the title and I am quite sure that I get more sex than you do.

I keep telling you: it doesn't count if they're dead!

Though there is something to be said for such relationships: you never have to worry about your "partner" leaving you. And, they rarely argue, which is great for domestic tranquility.

Re:FOSS overload

[davester666]

Man, I remember when one of my friends was so happy to have just received his masters degree, he tells us, a group of his friends, that now we have to call him master. Right away, I say, "Sure, we'll call you master. Master Baiter". After that, whenever we actually do call him master, he always says "Shut Up".

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes. I read the comments a bit sloppily. Thanks.

Re: FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

i had sex once and can guarantee that's infinite many more times than you ever will without paying for it.

Re:FOSS overload

[eu4ik]

Had sex once. Got bored halfway through. Went back to my Linux box. Much more interesting than trying to find nontrivial words in a language with only two words, In and Out, and one form of punctuation.

Oh come on now! That's enough for binary; you should be able to say anything!

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Made up story. I know this because:
a) The circumstances are a variant of a very common joke.
b) 13 and 14 year old kids would know the word, and would have themselves realized the double entendre.
c) Kids would not ask to have a "mass debate", that specific phrase being used is implausible.
d) How would you have been there to observe said events?

Made up story. Loser.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucks to be circumcised. A trombone can play more notes than a vuvuzela.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't work as binary - you can't really get it out without putting it in first, so, "Out, Out" or "In In" is not really a valid sentence.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

I once had a friend say a shower would feel golden. Good times.

Re:FOSS overload

[socceroos]

Actually, this one is true! Of course, I have no way of definitively proving that.

It does sound like it should be a common joke, doesn't it. We grew up in a very small country town in outback Australia. Total population of 25. I was one of eight kids. My cousins down the road were an eight kid family too. Together we made up most of the population of our town. =D

The internet wasn't a thing in this town - too remote. So no, 13 - 14 year olds in the middle of whoop-whoop belonging to a Christian family did not know the meaning. Our teacher did know the meaning - so did some of the more 'connected' high-schoolers. My brother did most certainly ask for a "mass debate" completely innocently. =P

I was there to observe said events because I was doing year 11 and 12 of high-school via distance-learning (learning with books and ringing teachers in cities for 'lessons' over the phone). Since our school consisted of two rooms, I could see and hear everything that was going on.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed hearing about my past. =P

Re:FOSS overload

[socceroos]

Cool story, bro!

Re: FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, man, I don't care if you say your dog liked it... he is an animal, and that's wrong.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough Troll, sticking your dick in another man's asshole isn't the kind of sex we're talking about here. I'm sure you enjoy it, but most of us wouldn't. Nice try though.

Re:FOSS overload

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, I don't get it.

Hello

[gagol]

Fragmentation and second class citizens.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

lets just add another layer of crud to the linux desktop.... it wasn't slow enough yet to compete with windows.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Thousands of distros, tens of DE's and WM's, lots of different graphical toolkits, tons of libraries with significant overlapping functions, tons of system utils that do similar things, 6 or 7 common http servers, but TWO graphics servers? FRAGMENTATION! It's all gonna fly apart!

You dumbass.

Re:Hello

[iggymanz]

there are actually at least 8 X servers

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like when x.org was released.

Oh wait. That didn't happen. At all.

See, people like yourself seem to be of relatively short memory when it comes to open source projects. Every time a potential fork comes up people like you come out of the woodworks to proclaim that fragmentation is coming and it'll destroy any chance that Linux has of becoming mainstream, blah, blah, blah. Uneducated bullshit. Again, look at what happened with XFree86 and x.org. The exact same nonsense, people like yourself doomsaying how a fork of something so integral to Linux would be its demise...and yet it wasn't. People had a choice, they chose the one that suited their ideals and needs better, done. Now the second class citizens are the XFree86 developers and foundation, if you could even call them that.

Mir, XMir, whatever Canonical and their shills are calling it this week? One of two things are going to happen with it. Either it turns out to be the amazing alternative that everyone thinks it will be and other distro's adopt it...or it doesn't, and they won't. The end. Don't believe me? See the above example. Or hey, see Android. Android phones are practically as fragmented as your average Linux distribution and PC at this point... Who's selling the most phones and tablets at this point? Samsung and Google. Their versions of Android aren't even similar to each -other-, Samsung has modified their own UI, hasn't hurt any of them yet.

Do a little reading sometime, it might make you a little less paranoid. It might make you a little more educated as well, but I won't hold my breath on that.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

2014: Year of Linux on the Desktop.

Re:Hello

[jedidiah]

...except X.org is just another Xserver. It's not an entirely new protocol. This is why X servers and clients from a variety of Unixen and non-Unixen can all talk to each other.

It's like HTTP.

Mir is more like Microsoft trying to create it's own web browser protocol.

You should really follow your own advice.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! It's worse than I thought! The Linux ecosystem, it's crumbling right in front of us!

Re:Hello

[smash]

We already have that with X11. Hello higher performance 3d rendering pipeline. Never know, maybe one day the free desktop will catch up to where NeXTSTEP was in 1988.

Re:Hello

[gmuslera]

The story is specifically about avoiding fragmentation, adding compatibility layers, so even if you don't develop for Mir it will run there. Maybe you meant goodbye fragmentation?

Re:Hello

[Grishnakh]

Don't be ridiculous; the whole idea of Mir and Wayland is to speed up the desktop, as X is horribly obsolete and slow. This "XMir" is just so X stuff can be run on Mir until it gets updated to run on Mir directly.

Of course, there's a whole separate issue which is that Mir competes with Wayland and fragments the Linux infrastructure, but this doesn't affect speed.

Re:Hello

[Grishnakh]

The lower the level, the worse fragmentation is. Who cares how many text editors are out there, for instance? It doesn't matter, because you can use any of them that you please.

But lower down the chain, fragmentation becomes more of a problem, because things higher up the stack rely on standardization below them to work.

How many Linux kernels are there, for instance? Only one. (There's some different versions, but they're all compatible with each other as far as running application code.) (There's also *BSD and HURD, but those aren't used nearly as much, and at least one of the BSDs actually has a Linux compatibility layer to run binary Linux applications.) Until recently, there was only one display server, X; so graphical applications and toolkits only had to work with that. Then along came Wayland, which promised to fix a lot of problems with X; this wasn't so bad: most of us knew that X was long in the tooth and a replacement had to come sooner or later, so having everyone transition from the old to the new was a doable thing. But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.

Anyway, back to your other complaints: different libraries aren't a problem. Using one library doesn't interfere with using another; applications just use whatever libraries they're linked against. System utils doing the same things isn't a problem: use the one you like, the others aren't going to keep you from doing that. Different HTTP servers is a good thing: use the one you like. Choice is a good thing, not a bad thing, as long as things are compatible. Graphical toolkits are a little lower on the stack, so that is a bit of a pain having more than one, so it's a balance between choice and standardization. Having two main ones doesn't seem so bad; 6 or 7 of them would be more of a problem. (There's more than 2 graphical toolkits, but only 2 of them are really in widespread use in Linux-land.) DEs are higher up the stack than toolkits; use the one you like. There's nothing preventing you from using KDE apps in GNOME, and vice-versa. However, DEs are lower than regular apps, usually have a lot of stuff integrated, and are the "face" seen by users, so it would be nice if Linux had its act together better in that regard. Of course, when a DE is tied directly to an incompatible display server, that really fragments things.

BTW, last I heard there were at least 3 or 4 different graphical toolkits for Windows (Win32, MFC, .NET), and those are all from the same company.

Re:Hello

[Grishnakh]

You don't know much about software, do you?

X.org wasn't a different display server, it was a fork of XFree86. Not only did it use the exact same protocol, it even used the exact same code (at least at first, though they added some new extensions later after everyone dumped XFree86 and switched to X.org).

No one (except a few morons) said that the X.org fork would be the "demise" of Linux. I remember the whole thing quite well; everyone was relieved that X on Linux would finally stop stagnating, and get some much-needed new development without that idiot Dawes holding everyone back. Within a very short time, all the distros had switched to the new fork and XFree86 became nothing more than a memory.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps he's worried our 1.26% share of the desktop market might slip?

(I slept through it. Did anyone happen to notice just when Linux beat W98 in the Desktop stats? Or PPC, I'm not proud.)

Re:Hello

[iggymanz]

nah, we just have.deb based or .rpm based. some whackjobs use kooky shit like arch or gentoo but numbers are in the "statistical noise" range.

("are you chinese or japanese" -- Hank Hill to Laotion)

Re:Hello

[Bengie]

Except Wayland is being developed by 15 year X devs that understand windowing systems, and engineers. Mir is being developed by developers.

what was that saying about developers and engineers. Windows was written by developers, Unix was designed by engineers?

Re:Hello

[Clsid]

The minute Canonical manages to get commercial driver support for lots of stuff I don't think you will be whining as much. Linux is built around choice, nobody forces you to use Mir or Wayland. So just choose whichever you like the most. And there are several Unix kernels, Linux being one of them. Trying to make a category of Linux in itself won't fly. OpenBSD was tough competition and you cannot go lower down the chain than this. It all worked out in the end, people like Gentoo bringing ports functionality from BSD.

Hell if anything I believe GTK+ and Qt were truly an issue at some point, and even then it all worked out. Fragmentation is what makes Linux extremely awesome. There is a zero bs attitude from users and developers and we have seen that quite a bit with OpenOffice and Gnome.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Never know, maybe one day the free desktop will catch up to where NeXTSTEP was in 1988.

Well, OS X/NeXTSTEP will almost have a file manager that's not completely brain damaged next release. It only took them 25 years.

Re:Hello

[smash]

There are plenty there, just not included in the base OS. Unless you count the command line.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Linux kernels are there, for instance? Only one. (There's some different versions, but they're all compatible with each other as far as running application code.) (There's also *BSD and HURD, but those aren't used nearly as much, and at least one of the BSDs actually has a Linux compatibility layer to run binary Linux applications.)

http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

Because we use Glibc the portability problems are very simple and most times it's just a matter of copying a test case for "k*bsd*-gnu" from another Glibc-based system (like GNU or GNU/Linux).

So, not really a problem if you have similar POSIX interface. How do you think Cygwin works?

If Mir becomes superior to X, X may get replaced. But I would not hold my breath.

Re:Hello

[Kjella]

But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.

All projects that have tried to replace X so far has failed miserably, so I'd say the odds are against both of them. If Ubuntu can do it as quickly and easily as they think then more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. The Wayland people are mostly seasoned X.org developers, I think they know better how complicated it really is. Either way I'm curious to see what Android AIOs will do to the market, give it a big screen, keyboard and mouse then what happens? I'm not so sure X or Wayland or Mir is a requirement to winning the desktop, at least it didn't look that way for smartphones/tablets.

Re:Hello

[kthreadd]

/bin/ls and friends are part of the base OS. What else do you need?

Re:Hello

[evilviper]

and at least one of the BSDs actually has a Linux compatibility layer to run binary Linux applications.)

Good god you're making me feel old. Not only have all the big three BSD OSes had Linux binary emulation for a long damn time... but I distinctly recall writing how-to's for a couple of them (that bounced around the internet and got translated into many languages I don't speak) some time LAST MILLENIUM.

No exaggeration there. The date on OpenBSD's compat_linux man page is March 1995. FreeBSD may have been a couple years earlier.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

So, not really a problem if you have similar POSIX interface. How do you think Cygwin works?

Very, very poorly.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the opposite, switch from XFree86 to Xorg was welcomed by the users instantly, as XFree86 succumbed to the same disease as the original X Consortium that XFree86 was an alternative for.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

For a while there I had to make a choice between XSun or X.Org during installation. For the first couple of builds XSun was the better option, but then X.Org surpassed it in performance, ease of configuration and all 'round compatibility.

Years before that I had used XFree86 to varying degrees of success in config over the years on different instances of the OS. ...and before that ....what X server did I use....my memory ain't what it used to

Re:Hello

[serviscope_minor]

Higher performance than what? With DRI/DRM, X11 based systems consistently get the best framerates for given hardware compared to other OSs. Hard to argue there's much room for improvement there.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

So i guess Mir is going to actually work then har har har

Re:Hello

[jalopezp]

It still improves Windows immensely.

Re:Hello

[serviscope_minor]

as X is horribly obsolete and slow.

Oh for heaven's sake, not this again!

[Citation needed]

Oh and here's mine:

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=357678

So, if X is so horribly slow and "obsolete" how come it gets better frame rates than anything else?

Seriously, for high performance stuff, Xorg (via DRM/DRI) basically allows a shared library to dump data straight at the graphics card without even the kernel; getting in the way for most of it. That is very efficient, and why X gets as good (and slightly better) frame rates than other "non obsolete" operating systems.

And do not even try to claim that this is somehow a new thing. On and off since it's inception, X11 has been the top performing GUI system (SGI in the 90's and according to the benchmarks Xorg now).

X11 deals with all the grotty stuff round the edge that isn't the domain of the graphics card very well, like wrangling windows and pointers, dealing with copy/paste and communication between clients, and also, of course, remoting. And it also knows when to get out of the way and let the efficient stuff be efficient.

Re:Hello

[korgitser]

millenium - a thousand anuses, from latin 'anus'
millennium - a thousand years, from latin 'annus'

Re:Hello

[serviscope_minor]

The minute Canonical manages to get commercial driver support for lots of stuff I don't think you will be whining as much.

Whatever makes you think that? Nvidia and AMD have had commercial drivers for years and people keep on whining for all the obvious reasons like impossible to debug crashes, EOLing support for heardware early, slow to update to new kernels, poor support for "new" features like xrandr and so on.

Re:Hello

[Grishnakh]

Polishing a turd still leaves you with a turd in the end.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Linux kernels are there, for instance? Only one. (There's some different versions, but they're all compatible with each other as far as running application code.)

Distros generally have their own kernel build, so it practice there's a ton of kernels out there, and there's generally little if any back-compat in the kernel, and certainly no ABI compatibility (see Grek KH's readme where it is claimed that it is impossible to do, which I always found amusing, seeing as FreeBSD retains ABI compatibility with Linux). Oracle has what it amounts to its own kernel with extensions and whatnot only available to OL. Red Hat generally stays on a given kernel version and backports to it, etc.

(There's also *BSD and HURD, but those aren't used nearly as much, and at least one of the BSDs actually has a Linux compatibility layer to run binary Linux applications.)

a) Each BSD has its own kernel. b) AFAIK only FreeBSD has the Linuxulator. c) Neither HURD nor the BSD kernels are in any way related to Linux.

Until recently, there was only one display server, X;

X11 as in Xorg, Xfree, XSun, and the others? X11 is a protocol. There were alternatives to X11, mind you: Y-Windows and various Frambuffer-based systems, but none were used much. Oh, and of course, Xorg with Nvidia drivers (which replace a fair deal of the underlying Xorg stuff with Nvidia's own stuff) and without.

so graphical applications and toolkits only had to work with that.

Let's forget about the various libraries between Xorg and those graphical applications that the various toolkits (GTK, QT, WxWidgets, EFL, SDL, OpenMotif and I know I'm forgetting a few) that graphical applications link against, link against.

But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.

So you're saying that fragmentation is well and good unless Canonical does it?

Using one library doesn't interfere with using another; applications just use whatever libraries they're linked against. System utils doing the same things isn't a problem: use the one you like, the others aren't going to keep you from doing that.

Of course there's the matter of having all kinds of junk that does the same thing in different ways littering the system, but nobody cares about that.

BTW, last I heard there were at least 3 or 4 different graphical toolkits for Windows (Win32, MFC, .NET)

I don't think you understand what a graphical toolkit is.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but now it's SHINY.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, your sarcasm might come off better if the fragmentation of X servers wasn't demonstrably 4 times worse than you thought. Your response just makes you look even more of a dumbass than your original "comment" and I use the term generously.

Re:Hello

[morgauxo]

Until the application you want to run no longer supports X. But you need X for it's remote display capabilities...

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Only one Linux kernel? No, that's not right. Many distributions have custom modifications in their kernels. For example, Red Hat used to use a bastard of a kernel which was basically 2.4 with 2.6 improvements stapled to it. Then there are distros which strip out non-free elements. Then there are kernels with extra drivers tossed in or minor patches applied. This not only means hardware support varies a great deal between one distro and the next (not to mention between versions of the same distro), but it also means some programs will run differently depending on which kernel is running on your distro. There are many forks of the Linux kernel and it is a real pain to support. These forks may re-base off the mainline kernel on a regular basis, but they still represent development and support problems.

Re:Hello

[raxx7]

The Quote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

Of course, using direct rendering, specially on a full screen application, you're bypassing the X server and it's slowness as much as possible.

Re:Hello

[serviscope_minor]

Of course, using direct rendering, specially on a full screen application, you're bypassing the X server and it's slowness as much as possible.

Firstly full screen has nothing to do with it and secondly, I don't get your point.

Any windowing system needs to be able to get out of the way as much as possible for maximum performance. Xorg already does that, thus making the claims that any new system will be faster a bunch of crap.

Re:Hello

[raxx7]

Err, no.
DRI get X out of the way a lot, but there still areas for improvement.

Besides using DRI for rendering (or doing it client side), once done rendering a frame, the X client needs to notify the X server so it can notify the X window manager so it can do it's job and notify the X server again so the frame can actually finally show up on screen on the correct place.
And while in theory an X server could do this very quickly and efficienty, the real X.org server is quite slow.

Clients also need to talk to the X server over other things like object property manipulation.
Once more, in theory an X server could handle this quickly and efficiently, the real X.org server is quite slow.

(And full screen does help, as there's less of this going on).

All in all, Wayland won't get you higher frame rates in Portal. But it will make your desktop smoother, with less CPU/GPU usage.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

And still Windows takes more than 5 times the amount of hard drive space, even before installing updates on it.

Re:Hello

[AvitarX]

Wayland specifically isn't just about getting out of the way to speed up rendering, but to throw out old bad assumptions that cause ugliness in the brief time rendering does take to catch up.

Resizing a window is bad in Windows XP and before, worse in X, and excellent in OS X, it's not the rendering speed, it's the ugliness as the rendering catches up (random flickers, fills with gray, or old textrures off the top of my head).

Re:Hello

[iggymanz]

make a bad joke and get modded "insigthful"......yeesh.......

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

That's already fixed in X, it's called Backing Store, and as long as your toolkit/application actually bothers to use it, it looks lovely. Try moving some xterms around in front and behind each other really fast and see how smoothly they update, then compare with some cruddy GTK apps.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Wayland make it three graphics servers? Not that your point is any less valid.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

...the whole idea of Mir and Wayland is to speed up the desktop, as X is horribly obsolete and slow. ...

A load of crap. I speeded up my X desktop immensely, even astoundingly, by not running Unity/Gnome/KDE in favor of FVWM. Very snappy. Oh, except for all those C++ apps with their bah-zillions of constructors going off prior to displaying anything & for which Mir/Wayland will show no improvement.

OTOH, I just *love* how those who allege "X is horribly obsolete and slow" make the claim without supporting evidence.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Higher performance than what? With DRI/DRM, X11 based systems consistently get the best framerates for given hardware compared to other OSs.

Actually, you don't. You believe that you do, either from reading pro-Linux propaganda posted elsewhere on the Internet, or via improperly conducted testing. (Running a game in Linux at 1024x768 with no anti-aliasing, compared to Windows at 1920x1080 with 4X MSAA enabled and thus declaring Linux the winner).

Re: Hello

[AvitarX]

Great, there's one problem down. I guess, except not really.

What about wayland??

[davydagger]

what about mirWayland, or waylandMir?

Re:What about wayland??

[TsuruchiBrian]

or XMirWayland or in case I want to run XMir in Wayland.

Re:What about wayland??

[styrotech]

Then there is the port of the KDE / Almquist shell integration - Kashmir

[groan]

Re:What about wayland??

[jatoo]

But should it run in user land, kernel land or wayland?

Re:What about wayland??

[serviscope_minor]

But what about wayland on X (sounds possible given the architecture) or mir for cross compatibility,

The you can have XmirXwalylandXXmirXwaylandmirwaylandXmirXwaylandwaylandmirX

Pro tip: don't forget to have an actual graphics device in there somewhere.

Re:What about wayland??

[F.Ultra]

Won't happen because very few applications will target Mir or Wayland directly. They will most likely use GTK+, Qt, SDL etc. So once either of those widgetslibraries supports both Mir and Wayland there is no need to emulate Mir on Wayland and vice verse. XMir and XWayland is needed though since there is still a lot of X11-only applications out there.

Multiple Displays?

[LifesABeach]

Finally USB Display functioning?

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Blaskowicz]

Each running separate X sessions and unable to move a window from one display to another? That is what I got the day I tried a second graphics card in my PC to connect a second monitor.
The OS was an Ubuntu version released long after Windows 7 and it still expected me to write some xinerama xorg.conf bullshit, which would have probably ended with maximized windows covering both displays and modal windows appearing right in the middle, on both sides of the physical divide. But I think I would have had to give up running the nvidia driver. LOL!

Sad thing is Windows 98 SE happily ran multiple monitors on different graphics cards (different card, different driver, different vendor).

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

losing weight

Re:Multiple Displays?

[jedidiah]

> Sad thing is Windows 98 SE happily

Probably not. You may not even be old enough to have even touched it yourself ever.

Mixing multiple vendors for different displays isn't even a recommended Windows setup now.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Rob_Bryerton]

Looking at his UID, his account was registered around 1999-2000'ish... of course he could've inherited it from his dad!

I will now get off of your lawn ;)

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet my work PC right now has both an AMD and an Nvidia card in it so that I could run three displays (neither cards can do more than by themselves). The AMD card came with the PC, and the Nvidia card happened to be an available spare card so I made it work. It wasn't even hard. Hooked everything up, loaded drivers, rebooted, done.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Been using X since the 80s, and mutil monitors on X since somewhere in the late 90s, both with the displays all on the same box, and later, with some of the displays running on separate computers using xdmx.

Using Xorg.conf for xinerama config, while maybe not ideal for grandma, wasn't terrible, and you only did it once. But, for folks like you, there is now xrandr which you can setup via xorg.conf, use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish, or just run shell commands to setup your multi-monitor layout (since it would be trivial to write [hell you could do it in a short shell script], there is probably a daemon available that will auto add a monitor when plugged in and remove it when unplugged, but I am not familiar with it if it exists).

As for not being able to move a window between monitors, you are doing it wrong. Depending upon your window manager, and how *you* set things up, you can have independent displays (uncommon, but apparently how you set things up), one big shared desktop like windows and mac (gnome, kde, etc.), or, something smarter, a kind of hybrid between the two where things act like a unified desktop when you want them to, but you can switch virtual desktops independently per each physical display-- which is *very* nice (e17).

You can drag windows between displays even when the displays are on different boxes (xdmx). Unfortunately xdmx only works with xinerama, and newer graphics cards only work with xrandr, so in a crappy transition period now for this. But, if you ever want to setup a video wall with 100 monitors acting as one unified display, xdmx is probably the only game in town.

  If you want to use MS Windows, nobody is stopping you, but please don't spread FUD.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Recommended no...maybe not. Supported. Yes.

Some of us have run multiple monitor and multiple graphics card setups since Win98 and NT 4 on 440BX reference boards and the shit just worked. Despite my love for FOSS let's be intellectually honest here. It took X a extra decade worth of development time to have decent multi-mon support and it had nothing to do with shitty vendor drivers. You couldn't run two Monochrome/VGA or SVGA X servers in Parallel and do window sharing.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, nope -- I believe GP has it right. I used a PCI card alongside a dual AGP to have a third monitor for Combat Flight Sim.

Probably 98SE. Outside chance it was 95 OSR2, but doubt it. Full drag-across displays, though. It worked fine, other than frame rate.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Bengie]

MY Voodoo2 ran really nice on my 440BX with a P3-700@933

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are using the nVidia driver you have to use their multiple monitor solution. They have a quite complicated control panel that let's you choose between Dual display and running Seperate X Servers. You simply choose the wrong one, this is actually on nVidia.

The nvidia option you want is TwinView.

Nvidia recently started supporting Xrandr which should allow the built-in screen configuration software to just work. (Haven't tested myself..)

Re:Multiple Displays?

[TheRealMindChild]

It was the way things were done in win9x. Moving to Win2k was a slap in the face when this was no longer supported

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182708

"The video adapters that are installed in your computer do not have to be identical. Each video adapter and monitor combination is separately enumerated by Windows; you can configure each combination to use different screen resolutions and color depths. For example, you can set the primary adapter to 1024 X 768 pixels with 256 colors and the secondary adapter to 800 X 600 pixels with 32,000 colors. "

Re:Multiple Displays?

[gnu-sucks]

I can relate to this.

Granted, I have seen it work just fine with different cards.

But with nvidia, I have two different cards and, yep, can't move a window from one screen to another.

debian linux on x86_64

Re:Multiple Displays?

[gnu-sucks]

Will that work with different nvidia cards? Ie, one 4500 and one 5000?

I think I tried this and it did not, but I can't remember the details of everything I attempted.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Blaskowicz]

For the record, I was running a geforce 8400GS and Radeon 7000 PCI on linux mint 13 Mate (i.e. Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 2's fork). The 8400GS could only do one VGA output for some reason.
Ten years ago I got a Voodoo5 5500, S3 Virge DX and S3 Virge running together on 98SE (just to try it out, then I used dual display a bit). Even videos would display on two screens at once when windows media player 6.0's overlapped the border, which I found was unexpected and impressive.

I can get that it was probably nvidia's fault.

Maybe Wayland/Mir are an opportunity to clean this all up and X11 windows can be used like any other window on the deskop. Just like Xming allows to run remote X11 apps seamlessly on Windows (works fine on 98, XP and 7)

It's weird to hear Canonical boasting that they've run an entire desktop in a window by the way, that's a more limited result. Yet there may be situations where it's useful :) (Running an android PowerVR driver instead of a linux one, getting around some stupid bug, displaying another computer's desktop)

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

MY Voodoo2 ran really nice on my 440BX with a P3-700@933

Your Voodoo 2 pretty much would have had to as it didn't do any 2d

Re:Multiple Displays?

[silviuc]

There are no 4000 series or 5000 series of nvidia cards. Those are ATI/AMD

Re:Multiple Displays?

[serviscope_minor]

I believe that Xrandr is a new event aletring windows that the screen configuration has changed (and a mechanism to query available changes and select them). Xinerama is the mechanism for dealing with multiple physical screens, their locations, gaps between them etc.

The two work well together and I believe that they are designed to work together.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[TeknoHog]

Voodoo2 can do some 2D, there are Linux drivers which enable you to use it for the only display. Too bad I sold mine before I learned about this, it would have been an interesting experiment.

In fact, if you think about it, 2D is a subset of 3D -- a texture, or one face of a cuboid, etc. Modern display hardware and software tend to use 3D engines for 2D stuff, so you don't need to write separate 2D engines. We used to have specialized 2D hardware tricks for a long time, but these days pretty much everything comes with some 3D capabilities.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are using the nVidia driver you have to use their multiple monitor solution.

No you don't. Or at least you didn't from ~2000 to 2008, when I was running nVidia multi-monitor setups via Xinerama. Sure, Twinview was and is an option, but you don't have to use it.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Xorg.conf for xinerama config, while maybe not ideal for grandma, wasn't terrible, and you only did it once.

If you want to use MS Windows, nobody is stopping you, but please don't spread FUD

What FUD? The user complained about having to write scripts to support multi-monitors on Linux, and you concurred.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Dagger2]

I had this experience too. I managed to get it running with a single X session, but XRandR only supports one "screen" (in X11 terms) per GPU, which means that you can drag windows between monitors on the same GPU, but the monitors on the other GPU are separate and you can't drag windows over to them. (Here's a corroborating mailing list post.) Window dragging works with Xinerama (windows maximized properly etc), but Xinerama doesn't work with 2D hardware acceleration, so you lose that.

Even with Xinerama, I still found some oddities. Menus in some programs (I guess probably "in some toolkits") would open aligned with the top of my smallest monitor -- if I maximized a program on my main monitor and tried to open the menu for it, the menu would show up a couple of inches away from the menu bar. XFCE's system menu on smaller monitors would try to open aligned with the top of the biggest monitor. The mouse behavior in the corners of monitors was terrible (either the mouse went into the dead zone, or it jumped several inches to fit onto the smaller monitor, depending on whether I was using Xinerama or XRandR), making it really difficult to hit anything in a corner.

None of this stuff happens on Windows. It just works. I don't have to give up 2D acceleration. And that's with XP, which is almost a decade older than the Linux version I was testing with. I was expecting the same from Linux, but... nope.

On the plus side, while writing this post I discovered that XRandR 1.4 is a thing now, and apparently it does include support for multiple GPUs. Maybe this stuff will actually work now.

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I haven't had that problem at all. I've been using Linux since 2008 (Ubuntu 8.10), and the xrandr gui has worked fine for me. The only time I've ever needed to edit xorg.conf was for more esoteric reasons, like using multiple mice.

(Posting AC because I've moderated.)

Re:Multiple Displays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not recommended by who? And why? By MS and for what reasons?

Fark I'm old enough to remember those days (Win95 onwards) and third party shit was always the go.

MS build a good OS, but everyhting else they do is crap.

KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Does KDE not work with this for some reason, or do these people just not like it?

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

The Kwin developer is an avowed Ubuntu hater. I believe he's indicated that he'll code kwin to not work if it detects Mir. Such is the bizarre, irrational hatred of anything Canonical/Ubuntu.

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE has been deprecated since version 4.0.

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

4.0 should have been classified as a beta at best, but it's matured into quite a nice desktop since then.

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE has been deprecated since version 4.0.

Ah, but that was before GNOME3 was released. Suddenly KDE matters again.

Re:KDE

[ChunderDownunder]

Canonical have had a public flamewar with KDE & Wayland devs about the existence of Mir.

KDE also have Plasma Active on Wayland in the pipeline, which would be a competitor to their tablet offering.

Hence the don't want to give legitimacy to the enemy.

[Posted from my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop - I guess I have a maximum of 12 months before X11 is dumped altogether in favour of Mir and I wipe the disk with debian stable]

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got quite a selective memory there, bud. The only parties that are hurling Molotov's are in the Wayland and KDE camps (mostly from the deranged kwin dev).

Re:KDE

[Grishnakh]

[Posted from my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop - I guess I have a maximum of 12 months before X11 is dumped altogether in favour of Mir and I wipe the disk with debian stable]

You can just move to Linux Mint KDE if you want. It's just like Kubuntu, without the ubuntu in the name and things seem slightly more polished. It remains to be seen whether Mint goes to Mir or Wayland, but since Mint doesn't support Unity at all, it'll probably be Wayland.

Re:KDE

[ChunderDownunder]

I do? I wasn't trying to take sides.

I thought the trouble started with the Mir project announcement that spread half-truths about Wayland's architecture, which the Wayland devs convey that no one from Canonical really commenced a dialogue on its capabilities. The 'deranged kwin dev' may be another story but as kubuntu is no longer a Canonical sponsored effort, it's a big ask for volunteers to upstream patches for a platform that, so far, only one distro uses and may bloat the architecture.

Re:KDE

[ChunderDownunder]

Thanks for the tip.

I know Mint comes in both Ubuntu and debian flavours but the Ubuntu version might become sidelined if X support falls into maintenance and Ubuntu doesn't carry a functioning Wayland release.

(I'll verify which flavours are mirrored by my ISP!)

Re:KDE

[Anne Thwacks]

It's just like Kubuntu, without the ubuntu in the name and things seem slightly more polished.

So I heard but it isn't true: I tried it on my Thinkpad T61 when Unity first appeared, and Mint would not even install, despite Ubuntu having run fine since the T61 was manufactured. Fortunately I discovered

> apt-get install gnome-fallback-shell

and all is well (Not quite: the bastard that failed to make Unity/Gnome/Kde an option during the install process should still redeem his one-way ticket to the Gulag).

Re:KDE

[jones_supa]

Citation?

Re:KDE

[jones_supa]

Brace yourselves, KDE 5 is coming!

For those that didn't hear already, KDE 4.11 will be the last Plasma Workspaces feature release in the KDE4 series and this upcoming version will be maintained for a period of two years. It will be feature-frozen and the developers will just provide bug-fixes.

Once KDE 4.11 is out the door, KDE developers can begin focusing much more of their efforts on KDE Frameworks 5, Qt 5, and KDE Plasma Workspaces 2.

This should also make Plasma Desktop 4.11 an excellent candidate for inclusion in distributions that have a longer shelf-life.

Re:KDE

[unixisc]

Canonical still owns Lubuntu & Xubuntu, but Kubuntu has been handed over to Blue Systems. So it would be up to Blue Systems to decide whether they want to go Wayland or Mir or simply stay w/ X11

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what your point is. KDE 5 will not in any way be such a major shake-up as KDE 4 was. It will probably be less of a disturbance than going from KDE 2 to 3 was.

Re:KDE

[KugelKurt]

He's talking BS.
Martin Graesslin, the KWin maintainer, began to prepare KWin for Wayland before Mir was even announced. So he designed the transition path to support two and only two back ends. See https://plus.google.com/115606635748721265446/posts/136nV4uojKH for details (public post, no need for a G+ account).

Graesslin also made it repeatedly clear that he won't support single-distro solutions. That means no support for MS Windows in KWin, OSX' Quartz, or Android's SurfaceFlinger. Somehow nobody ever had a problem with that decision. Only after Canonocal announced Mir Ubuntu fanboys began to whine.

There are no technological benefits for Mir over Wayland. Canonical made false claims as outlined on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODA but they've since redacted the statements. Wayland even works with Android drivers: http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html

The reasons for Mir are not technological, they are purely economical. Canonical wants to establish asymmetric licensing to have an economic advantage over the competition: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html
Wayland OTOH is under MIT/X11 license for everybody. This means that not only can any Linux vendor grab it and to anything with it, incl. to make an Android version that uses Wayland: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2012/09/wayland-on-android-upgrade-to-404-and.html
Mir's licensing makes it forever impossible to become part of any major BSD variant. Wayland, however, is being ported to FreeBSD: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwMzE

Wayland is being pushed by industry giants such as Intel and Red Hat, as well as smaller companies like Collabora (creators of many technologies commonly used on GNU-based Linux such as Telepathy, WebKit-GTK, etc.: https://www.collabora.com/projects/ ).
Mir is just backed by Canonical who, while claiming to be the most popular Linux distributor, still makes no money: http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/canonical-ubuntu-linux-is-still-not-profitable.html

Re:KDE

[KugelKurt]

Brace yourselves, KDE 5 is coming!

No: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/06/there-is-no-kde5/

Re:KDE

[KugelKurt]

You've got quite a selective memory there, bud. The only parties that are hurling Molotov's are in the Wayland and KDE camps (mostly from the deranged kwin dev).

The mere existence of Mir is "hurling Molotovs" at Wayland: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODA
To claim that anybody other than Canonical started that "war", is simply lying.

Re:KDE

[KugelKurt]

Canonical still owns Lubuntu & Xubuntu, but Kubuntu has been handed over to Blue Systems.

Blue Systems pay for Kubuntu but the Kubuntu trademark is owned by Canonical.
Blue Systems have their own Linux distribution called Netrunner which, for the time being, is based on Kubuntu.

Re:KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet even though Wayland is backed by 'giants' like Intel and Red Hat, it still doesn't have more than $400,000 available to the project.
Canonical has been dumping a lot more money into Mir.

Re:KDE

[KugelKurt]

And yet even though Wayland is backed by 'giants' like Intel and Red Hat, it still doesn't have more than $400,000 available to the project.
Canonical has been dumping a lot more money into Mir.

I'm interested where you got those numbers from. I gave an extensive list of references, you gave none.
Considering that Canonical is still losing money (see above), it may be very plausible that Shuttleworth will at some point stop "dumping a lot more money into Mir".

Points at AC

[Anonymous Coward]

Hideki!

Re:Points at AC

[Anonymous Coward]

Weaboo faggot.

Finally some competition for Wayland

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean that in the nicest way. X is obviously on the way out (long term), and something has to replace it. XWayland looks promising since it got an early lead, but I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed. I disagree with some of Canonicals positions in other areas (systemd), but I'm patient enough to wait and see a victor emerge eventually. And hopefully we can avoid a bigger fiasco than what happened with KDE4 when X starts to become deprecated.

Re:Finally some competition for Wayland

[ArsonSmith]

X11 is a little long in tooth, X12 will most likely be the next windows system.

Re:Finally some competition for Wayland

[unixisc]

Is there going to be an X12? Some of the main X11 devs are working on Wayland. Have any thought about doing an X12?

Re:Finally some competition for Wayland

[KugelKurt]

I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed.

Mandriva added easy driver installation to Linux way before Ubuntu's Jockey even existed.
Canonical also does not develop drivers, therefore I don't get how you think it matters what Canonoical may know what's needed. So far the FOSS drivers were developed by AMD (radeon), Intel, Google (Gallium-based Intel drivers), SUSE (radeonhd), and Red Hat (nouveau, radeon, and more). Canonical never ever even touched GPU driver code.

Re:Finally some competition for Wayland

[KugelKurt]

Is there going to be an X12? Some of the main X11 devs are working on Wayland. Have any thought about doing an X12?

X12 just was a tentative name for some imaginary future replacement. Even though there were some X12 ideas docs in the past, the reality is that Wayland the the de facto X12.

pictures of all desktops mentioned running on XMir

[bmullan.mail]

http://test.ubuntu-discourse.org/t/non-unity-desktops-now-running-on-xmir/479/2

Is this like Hybryde Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hybryde Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution for the desktop.

Its most unusual feature is an option to switch rapidly between multiple desktop environments and window manager without logging out - the list includes Enlightenment 17, GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell and GNOME 3 "Fallback" mode), KDE, LXDE, Openbox, Unity, Xfce and FVWM.

This is achieved via a highly customisable Hy-menu, which also allows launching applications and configuring the system. All open applications are carried to any of the available desktops. The system offers an interesting way to work fluidly in a multi-desktop environment.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=hybryde

How long till RedHat poaches another Canonical dev

[Anonymous Coward]

Making significant headway with Mir, it probably won't be long till Red Hat hires this Canonical developer out from under them to put a kibosh on the project.

Re:pictures of all desktops mentioned running on X

[Anonymous Coward]

http://test.ubuntu-discourse.org/t/non-unity-desktops-now-running-on-xmir/479/2

This is one of those software Rube Goldberg contraptions, is what I would say if we were not talking about the land of Star-NIX, which since we are, EVERYTHING is a bloody Rube Goldberg contraption, so that assertion is really as significant and meaningful as running into a bunch of people frolicking in the sunshine and announcing that the sky is blue. It'll get a few people's attention for a second, but only because they're expecting the statement to be followed by some species of punchline, and are waiting to see if the joke pays off.

When I started screwing around with Linux, I cobbled together a bunch of scripts and managed to get my computer to make me breakfast, which was amazingly cool, but I did it from the command line, and while trying to extract the command to a text file, I accidentally deleted ~/.bash_history, and couldn't remember how the hell I did any of it. After that I had a bit of a nervous breakdown, and now I can barely remember that in BASH, 'cd..' doesn't work without a space character or an alias command to obviate the space, (which was once the first thing I did after a fresh install, that and making 'la' do 'ls -laFX --color=true' or whatever. Like I said, can't really remember, and colorls is now default anyway, saving me the trouble.

HEY EVERYONE! Aside from the lack of consequence-free fuck-fests going on behind the bedroom doors of every other house in America, aren't you GLAD it's not the sixties anymore, and we aren't on THAT side of the advent of Unix, etc., and all its descendants and their creamy goodness!

Woo! Great trade. Actually, I wish it were still the late 60's, when people gave a shit and you could fuck freely and the worst thing you might have to do is buy someone breakfast after. Now there's global warming and AIDS and SHMAIDS and BLAIDS and SARS, and H2N99 and 17 year Cicadas and Super Asian Mosquitoes and black mold, and of course mass shootings every few days with assault rifles, and people screaming about how the US president is a NAZI, and somehow at the same time a Commie, while also finding the time to be both a secret atheist and a Crypto-Muslim while conspiring with Israel to murder all the puppies and kittens... (particularly weird for a Muslim, but I digress,) and 24 hour News shows that ironically show no actual News anymore, 24 hours a day.

Fuck, I miss the 60's. All you had to worry about was Commies and maybe gonorrhea. Penicillin still fucking worked. Sorry, just waxing nostalgic.

But yeah, this desktop that can run Ubuntu is cool too. Sure. Why is it cool again? I've forgotten.

Re:pictures of all desktops mentioned running on X

[Anonymous Coward]

Impressive troll.

Starts off sort of coherent then starts to ramble, then launches into full on irrelevant random WTFery.

Re:pictures of all desktops mentioned running on X

[Anne Thwacks]

So what happened to the punch line where you sell your tape backup solution?

Shittleworth

[Anonymous Coward]

And next out of the Lennux^WCanonical camp...

kerneld! The replacement for the Linux kernel that runs as a service!

So basically

[Chrisq]

So basically we have an outdated interface and replace it with some added complexity, then another layer which gives us the same outdated interface.

Re:So basically

[serviscope_minor]

What's outdated about X11? And no, the presence of old API calls for backwards compatibility does not make it outdated.

Re:So basically

[s1lverl0rd]

This is how it's done, and this is how it has been done for a long, long time.

That brand new Intel CPU in your machine? Yeah, it still runs the same code its predecessor did back in 1976. The internals have changed and become more complex many times, but the outdated interface is still there if you need it. It's not pretty, but there's not really any other way.

Re:So basically

[KugelKurt]

What's outdated about X11? And no, the presence of old API calls for backwards compatibility does not make it outdated.

Answer: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland_situation&num=1

FreeDesktop.org?

[emblemparade]

But think of something like FreeDesktop.org: it's possible for project to work together on standards in order to guarantee that other layers in the stack would indeed treat the layer next to them as interchangable.

So it's really less about technical difference than about a vibrant will and culture of cooperation. It's very unfortunate that there are sour grapes on various fronts: Canonical has gone about Mir quite poorly, and it's unclear at this state if there is a will for compatability on Wayland and Mir teams, although this may change in the future if both become popular and users demand it.

Note that this refers not only to layers "above" but also layers "below". For example, it's not just enough that Wayland and Mir share a compatible API for servers like XMir/XWayland to run on top, but also that they allow for using the same video drivers. In this particular case, the layer below (drivers) is so problematic that it's the important one to focus on.

Nvidia?

[tapspace]

I mean, the Linux community has been bitching about this too. It sounds like an Nvidia Optimus laptop. The fact of the matter is that Nvidia is the villian in this story, not Linux. Search around a bit (hint: maybe Linus has a thing or two to say).

Waay too easy.

[thegarbz]

Using Xorg.conf for xinerama config, while maybe not ideal for grandma, wasn't terrible, and you only did it once. But, for folks like you, there is now xrandr which you can setup via xorg.conf, use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish, or just run shell commands to setup your multi-monitor layout (since it would be trivial to write [hell you could do it in a short shell script], there is probably a daemon available that will auto add a monitor when plugged in and remove it when unplugged, but I am not familiar with it if it exists).

Unfortunately xdmx only works with xinerama, and newer graphics cards only work with xrandr, so in a crappy transition period now for this. But, if you ever want to setup a video wall with 100 monitors acting as one unified display, xdmx is probably the only game in town.

You had me at "Just right click and click output to and select multi-monitor". Phew that was easy.

Except you didn't say that. What you propose is something that Linux was known for in the 90s, really shit complicated and borderline unusable multi-monitor support.

Re:Waay too easy.

[swillden]

Did you miss the "use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish"?

Re:Waay too easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because those options also exist doesn't mean you must use them. Use a WM that has the xrandr hooks built-in, and click away.

As for in the 90s being borderline unusable-- I never had any issues. In fact, xinerama worked better for me than xrandr does today.

A legitimate complaint is that xorg, to address your concerns, replaced xinerama with xrandr before xrandr was at feature parity with xinerama. But, xrandr does bring some interesting new functionality, and every release gives back a bit more of the missing functionality. As I am not putting in the dev hours on xorg, I won't complain.

Re:Waay too easy.

[thegarbz]

No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.

Re:Waay too easy.

[swillden]

No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.

But... it's not. The GUIs for this work quite well. You can keep trying to prop this strawman up, but he's still made of straw.

Re:Waay too easy.

[thegarbz]

Ok so what popular out of the box user friendly distro supports this without creative tweaking? Ubuntu? Mint? Nope, and they account for the lions share of user friendly distros. Just google Ubuntu multimonitor and see the clusterfuck of tweaks that need to be done to fix certain nuances of the horrendous Linux multimonitor support. Just the top two results, one ends up going back to a custom xorg.conf, the other uses a bloody hex editor to fix flash fullscreening to wrong window issues. Oh hell just search multi-monitor issues in the Ubuntu or Mint forums.

Just because my man is made of straw doesn't mean he fails to prove a point. And you have proved another, which is that power users are blind to the severity of bugs which they are able to fix themselves. Just because you got the perfect setup working doesn't mean that multi-monitor support in Linux is a big bucket of shit, and there are users who are massively turned off by the fact that something as simple as using the second output of their video card requires them to Google for answers.

Re:Waay too easy.

[swillden]

Ok so what popular out of the box user friendly distro supports this without creative tweaking? Ubuntu?

Yep. It's worked flawlessly for me many times.

Re:How long till RedHat poaches another Canonical

[KugelKurt]

Making significant headway with Mir, it probably won't be long till Red Hat hires this Canonical developer out from under them to put a kibosh on the project.

Significant headway? This is just X11 and Mir side by side using XMir. Something like this is possible with Wayland since at least a year, maybe even since 2011. For proof of running X11 applications under Wayland via XWayland see the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/waylandweston/videos

Nothing gained for Ubuntu

[allo]

Soon these Desktops will need wayland. so they need to run wayland on Xmir to run Xfce. Have a lot of fun...

Re:Nothing gained for Ubuntu

[KugelKurt]

Soon these Desktops will need wayland. so they need to run wayland on Xmir to run Xfce. Have a lot of fun...

I don't see a real problem with just ending Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.
Despite PR talk, Canonical is not interested in them. If Canonical was, Mir would not exist and Wayland would be used as originally planned.
There are many fine Linux distributions that ship Xfce etc.

Seems more like when Apple changed things for OSX

[Marrow]

I dont think this is trying to force proprietary libraries. Its just trying to add something new with a compatibility layer for the old.

Will the new stuff be more compatible?

[Marrow]

Are the designs (Mir, Wayland) more amenable for creating cross-platform libraries. Maybe the new stuff brings us closer to display libraries that can hop operating systems.

Re:Will the new stuff be more compatible?

[serviscope_minor]

Are the designs (Mir, Wayland) more amenable for creating cross-platform libraries.

Time will tell. From that point of view, X has proven exceptionally portable and has run on a massive variety of systems, both using native graphcis drivers and non native ones (XWayland, Xmir, Cygwin/X, Darwin/X).

XMir so why not WaylandMir

[erik.martino]

If you can make XMir, why shouldn't you be able to make a tripple protocol display server. Mir and Wayland in the same server. Is that possible? Perhaps Surfaceflinger as well to support Android Apps.

Re:XMir so why not WaylandMir

[KugelKurt]

That makes no sense at all.
If I understood the mail discussion between Mir devs and others correctly, the display manager would "just" need to both Wayland and Mir to switch between a Wayland and a Mir session without reboot. The problem is that nobody wants to add Wayland support to LightDM (Canonical is not interested and anybody else would be required to sign the CLA and hand over all rights to Canonical which nobody wants) and nobody (incl. Canonical) wants to add and maintain Mir support in the other display managers.

Obligatory Russian Space Station Joke

[shadowknot]

I predict that Mir will last a lot longer than we all expect despite being made on a budget and falling to pieces by the end of its life. It will then fragment and what's left will end up in the south Pacific.