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Canonical To Ship Mir Display Server In Ubuntu 13.10
An anonymous reader writes "Canonical has announced today that they intend to ship the Mir Display Server by default in Ubuntu 13.10, rather than Ubuntu 14.04 as originally planned. They moved ahead their Mir adoption since the code is materializing and they want Mir/XMir widely tested prior to the Ubuntu 14.04 Long-Term Support release. Mir in Ubuntu 13.10 will be using the XMir X11 compatibility layer to run the Unity 7 desktop and there will be fallback support for running an X.Org Server if the graphics drivers don't support Mir."
I wish people would stop deciding to call their new software project/product "Unity". Too many things called that now.
If everything was the same in every OS, things would be very boring.
For 13.10 and even now for 14.04, they're running everything in XMir. They actually pushed native Mir/Unity 8 BACK to 14.10.
Surely its a futile endeavour after http://science.slashdot.org/story/00/10/03/189218/mir-likely-to-be-deorbited-updated this
Dear Ubuntu,
I have had 6 happy years using you every day. You showed me so many things - the world of Linux I never knew. I will never forget the time we've shared.
But you've you've changed. You're not the OS I once loved. I'm sorry to have to tell you this. I don't wish to hurt you. But I have to tell you the truth...
I've switched to Mint.
Hard to say. As of now, the only multi-monitor mode working is mirroring.
Wrong article ;) You must be using unity.
Switching to another Desktop Environment before adapting your Desktop? This just sounds like a bad idea all around.
If your goal is to make Unity run faster, why would you switch to something that requires a compatibility layer? Heck Ubuntu, why not just write it for windows, and run the DE in WINE?
Gotta love leeches like Canonical. 99% of Ubuntu is other people's work but be damned if they can give back or work with others rather than walling off their garden.
I haven't kept my eye on every twist and turn in this story.
My mental model of the stack pre all these Mir, Wayland shenanigans was this -
applications
window manager
X
kernel
I guess a couple of layers have been added now? Wayland seems to be a replacement for X that removes the X part from the stack compressing window manager and display server into one layer, so where does Mir sit?
The REAL story is that your flathead Ubuntu was JUST about starting to approach a state reliable usability when they released the mother off all alpha state overhauls. They did it before with the move away from config files to the registry and nautilus. With each change we went from a system we had finally managed to get working to a system that wasn't working as we wanted AND had tons of bugs too.
It ISN'T like releasing a new screw driver THAT WORKS, it is like releasing a new screw driver that stabs you in the back and does unsanitary things with your hammer. If Ubuntu was a car, it would come with 50% new philps head screws that break off, have rusted or been installed the wrong way around through use of your semen covered hammer, 25% flathead screws that are no longer compatible with your old flathead screw and the new flathead screw isn't being developed anymore because it is going to be replaced, somewhere in 2023 and 25% of the screws have been left out because their use case is to obscure.
Most Linux users I know aren't all that into cutting edge. Most of really just want a desktop that runs programs and then we use the programs and never ever think about the desktop again. The desktop isn't a screwdriver, it is the packaging for the belt for toolbox you never put your screwdriver and anyway, you never ever move the toolbox.
I have all the applications I need open all the time. I do not NEED a launcher and I most certainly never EVER need to search something and then find both results from logs files, my "art" collection and amazon at the same time. I just want my desktop to provide the most basic services like paste and copy and then to GO AWAY!
And I do NOT need a build in mail client, music player or whatever. I can fucking pick my own. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, if you made the desktop 100% reliable, safe and fast THEN you could spend your time adding crap as optional crap I would never bother with. Unity could have been a skin (nobody would have used it but hey though titties). But Ubuntu/Gnome/KDE seem to insist that anytime their products achieve "almost works" they MUST redesign.
I am a developer, I understand the desire to not continue to work on the same old same old, that doing that last 10% of making something really work takes 90% of the time and that that time sucks donkey balls. But that is life.
All Unity and Gnome3 and KDE have shown is that it doesn't take Ballmer and closed source to give the user what they don't want. Good job! You can compete with MS and release as big a turds as them.
And at least Windows 8.1 is adding the start button again.
Aaaah, that felt good.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Right. As long as it is network-aware I'm fine with it.
Have gnu, will travel.
'Cause when you try to run that graphical program from your Ubuntu server and display the output on Windows, it doesn't work because they've invented Yet Another Graphics System that's incompatible with everything else.
The beauty of X was that you knew an app on SGI Unix would display on OS/2, SunOS, VMS or anything else that supported X in the OS or third-party addons because they all used the same protocol. You still know an X11 app on Ubuntu will display on Windows so long as it doesn't do video playback or other kinds of special cases which are just too damn slow over a LAN.
Tomorrow, who knows what will talk to what?
What is at stake here is the definition of "works". Canonical shipped Unity - which gave users the impression that their definition of "works" does not include "able to carry out the user's most basic tasks", or "shipped with a viable way to avoid the use of an untested and serverely restricted UI".
In short, given their track record. "works" is unlikely to be the average user's experience of Mir.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I installed Ubuntu 13.04 last night, because I wanted to run Steam games on Linux and it was their recommended system. First lesson: Clicking the "use the internet to install the most up to date code" is a mistake that causes the installer to stall for many minutes while it does downloads in the background.
Second Lesson: The disk partitioner seems exceedingly bare bones. I installed a new hard drive to do the install on, but the installer really really wanted to blow away my windows disk. I had to do the partitioning by hand (no "automatically lay out something sensible on this disk" option that I could find). This wasn't a hurdle for me, but it seemed pretty unfriendly for new people.
Third Lesson: The user manager is woefully bad. If you want to specify the UID for a user (so they match your other systems and make NFS work so much better), well, you can't. There's no option for that. The password requirements also seem rather steep (16 characters mixed case with punctuation no repeats no dictionary words can't be changed in any gui anywhere?)
Fourth Lesson: the default package manager is now an Apple app store ripoff?!? Ok, the UI is annoying, but at least I can just search for a package like the nfs client and get it right? No. It's back to the command line for you for some apt-get if you want to install a normal package.
Fifth Lesson: Software manager has a kind of hidden option to use the nVidia binary blob drivers so you get decent 3D performance. Doing so breaks compositing which breaks the entire desktop. 3D games run great though! Compositing seems kind of dumb anyway, and the weird search box that wanted to find Amazon products that are similar to "xterm" is something I could do without anyway. I'm just going to install Windowmaker instead once I figure out how to change the damn window manager preferences.
I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be the more polished distribution? Why is everything so hard or annoying in it? I guess the partial answer is Gnome 3, but even that doesn't explain everything. Man that control panel is missing about a million basic features though.
I read the internet for the articles.
As a Linux user I really could care less which X-server I'm using.
Mir isn't an X server. It has an X compatibility layer (XMir) which can be used to run an X server alongside Mir, but it's not an X server in itself.
Generally the complaints are that it's brand new (announced only a few months ago), will likely be very prone to breaking (at least for the first year or two), still requires an X server to be running to run X applications, and is trying to do something that Wayland is also trying to do (but has been trying to do for several years longer). Basically, it's a rather extreme case of NIH (not invented here), which is trying to be pushed out in a state that it's probably not ready to be used seriously.
The irony, which hasn't escaped the developers involved, is that it's the same situation as systemd, except reversed. This time it's Ubuntu (Mir) trying to replace something started by Fedora (Wayland), rather than Fedora (systemd) trying to replace something started by Ubuntu (upstart).
Hard to say. As of now, the only multi-monitor mode working is mirroring.
Can we choose which axis the displays are mirrored around?
Upside-down and left-to-right are so passé; a skewed mirroring axis would be better.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Something that pops up a window in X11 that displays graphics using Mir protocol transactions? Maybe Mir is 10 times better to develop for than X11. What are
the development libraries like? And how are people going to know when its "safe" to develop for Mir and abandon X11?
I'm all for open drivers like Noveau or the efforts by Intel and AMD, they are fantastic and very much needed. It almost makes me glad that GLES 2.0 is pretty much almost there.
But for those of us who do 3D programming, 3D modelling or just play games on steam that requiere 3D, the only option is the binary ones. If Ubuntu (because of MIR) takes away support for them, I'll be taking Ubuntu away from my computer.
You can find the real "Synaptic" package manager in there somewhere.
(I was going to say in the System menu, but they seem to have misplaced it...)
`apt-get install xubuntu-desktop` helps too.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Canonical is building Mir to replace X so that it can be used in it's mobile devices. They are not putting effort into Wayland because it is licensed as MIT where Mir will be GPLv3. This is to safeguard Ubuntu mobile devices. XMir is required just as XWayland is required to bridge the transition gap. I'm not advocating Mir in any way but facts are facts.
Call me a stubborn shit, but for the foreseeable future I will continue to use X Server. From what I have heard, there is no 'ssh +X' functionality in either Wayland or Mir.
First Lesson: try Kubuntu (real package manager, fast and solid desktop) :D
And seriously: any modern OS will require a ton of updates in the first install.
Synaptic is not installed by default, you have to go down to the command line to install it it seems.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm running 12.04LTS and it's *very* flaky! I was hoping it would stabilise, but it's becoming clear that once a release is out the door, LTS or not, it pretty much gets forgotten for the next-great-thing(TM) that Canonical are playing with.
Each Ubuntu has always been been a bit two-steps-forward, one-step-back, but I can't help thinking that 10.10 or so was the last one where I felt I was running something better than the previous release.
And I'm not complaining about Unity - I actually quite like having a launcher on the left and integrated menus on a laptop as it makes better use of the screen. On a desktop I can live with it. But software stability is now lower, and I doubt Mir is going to be stable for a few years yet, and I'm tired of being part of Canonical's experiment.
If Xubuntu avoids Mir, then I might use that, but otherwise I'll have to switch to Mint or even Debian.
While systemd takes a drastically different approach to initialization than upstart, the similarities between mir and wayland far outweigh their differences, and most of the stated reasons for not adopting wayland seem based on misunderstanding rather than significant issues with the architecture.
Perhaps mir will be a winning move for Canonical. Perhaps it will even be adopted outside Ubuntu. I wouldn't bet on it.
Neither Mir nor Wayland are X servers, though they do provide an add-on X server as a shim to allow "legacy" apps to run. And before anyone complains "What's the difference", it's the same as the difference between Windows 7, and Ubuntu (which provides Wine as a shim to allow "legacy" apps to run...)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.