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Ubuntu 13.10 Will Not Ship Mir By Default
An anonymous reader writes "Ubuntu 13.10 is due for release later this month, and the Ubuntu developers were planning to replace the native X Server with Mir/XMir as Canonical's next-generation Ubuntu display server. However, they have now decided Mir will not be the Ubuntu 13.10 default on the desktop over the XMir X11 compatibility layer suffering multi-monitor issues and other problems. Canonical still says they will use Mir for Ubuntu Touch 13.10 images and remain committed to the Mir project."
Both to RedHat and Cannonical for actually trying to innovate in this space.
At least one of the projects will fail and there will be instability for those trying out the new solutions, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try. I love seeing this because whatever happens, it will make desktop Linux more fun!
Or maybe they can stick with X and replace unity with XFCE.
XFCE don't fuck it up, all you have to do is stay yourself.
A big thumb up for XFCE from me. It runs fast, is relatively bug-free, and has plenty of configurability. However a little tweak which I like to do is turn off the default compositor and replace it with Compton. It is slick, does not suffer from tearing problems, and offers some extra eye candy with fade in/out and shadow effects.
This kind of setup runs as fast as Windows, which is very fast these days. However on that Linux setup you will also get lower memory consumption, I was hovering around 150MB when in an empty desktop. A Windows desktop grabs about 500MB (you can crank that slightly down by disabling some services, but it is usually not worth the effort).
Yeah, yeah, cue all the "X11 is crufty and nobody needs all those awesome features it has". Sure. Right. One question: what do you think Wayland and Mir will look like in five years, especially if you're leaving out highly desirable features from day one?
The problem is that X11 doesn't have "awesome features". It has a critical path which acts as a bottleneck and a bunch of crap that nobody uses any more. And increasingly it has a bunch of extensions trying to work around the framework's deficiencies which reside in their own processes and increase the render and network latency.
So whatever form Wayland takes the chances are it'll be a damned sight more maintainable than X11.