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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."
what about mirWayland, or waylandMir?
Cool
Finally USB Display functioning?
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.
there are actually at least 8 X servers
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.
You understood it. Nowhere in the title or summary does it say anything about FOSS.
...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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
OMG! It's worse than I thought! The Linux ecosystem, it's crumbling right in front of us!
Truth. He is indeed a master baiter.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
http://test.ubuntu-discourse.org/t/non-unity-desktops-now-running-on-xmir/479/2
KDE has been deprecated since version 4.0.
Ah, but that was before GNOME3 was released. Suddenly KDE matters again.
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.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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?
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]
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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!)
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.
There are plenty there, just not included in the base OS. Unless you count the command line.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
/bin/ls and friends are part of the base OS. What else do you need?
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So, not really a problem if you have similar POSIX interface. How do you think Cygwin works?
Very, very poorly.
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.
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).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
So what happened to the punch line where you sell your tape backup solution?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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!
So basically we have an outdated interface and replace it with some added complexity, then another layer which gives us the same outdated interface.
Citation?
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.
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.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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
It still improves Windows immensely.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
millenium - a thousand anuses, from latin 'anus'
millennium - a thousand years, from latin 'annus'
FCKGW 09F9 42
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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).
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
Brace yourselves, KDE 5 is coming!
No: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/06/there-is-no-kde5/
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.
Polishing a turd still leaves you with a turd in the end.
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.
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.
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
Soon these Desktops will need wayland. so they need to run wayland on Xmir to run Xfce. Have a lot of fun...
Until the application you want to run no longer supports X. But you need X for it's remote display capabilities...
I dont think this is trying to force proprietary libraries. Its just trying to add something new with a compatibility layer for the old.
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.
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.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
make a bad joke and get modded "insigthful"......yeesh.......
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.
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
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".
Great, there's one problem down. I guess, except not really.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg