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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."

110 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. There's hope yet by Chrisq · · Score: 1

    If they continue to have problems perhaps they will go back to the idea of supporting the Wayland project. There's hope for Ubuntu Gnome yet.

    1. Re:There's hope yet by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:There's hope yet by Ynot_82 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Gentoo user here, just to side-step any Ubuntu fanboy responses.

      Why are two competing display server stacks considered a problem in this case?

      Over the years we've had countless situations like this
      The various desktop environments, package management systems, initialisation systems, boot loaders, audio stacks, etc. etc.

      Often seen as the benefit of open-source software.
      The ability for multiple software components to exist that fulfil the same function. May the best man win.

      Innovation and progress comes from each project trying to out-do it's rivals.

      Often these competing solutions have a single distro or company behind them, driving development forward.

      Why is Ubuntu's new display server, competing against X.org and Wayland any different?

    3. Re:There's hope yet by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Informative

      You specified Ubuntu GNOME, yet the article was about Ubuntu in particular. Despite Ubuntu GNOME being Ubuntu based, I had expected that if anything, they would be supporting Wayland. Did the Ubuntu GNOME group express any sort of interest in Mir?

      No the point is that when Ubuntu switches to Mir, Ubuntu gnome will have to replace the whole graphics server and compositor rather than just teh display manager, amd to get advantage of Weyland use Weyland-enabled apps. It probaby won't be worth doing - the resulting system would be so different that you may as well have your own debian based distribution as making a variant of Ubuntu.

    4. Re:There's hope yet by squiggleslash · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I'd rather they stick with X.

      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?

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    5. Re:There's hope yet by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Funny

      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?

      Dude seriously. The latency of X is killing me. Have you seen, the signals have to make 4 extra IPC calls before they're seen by the application. By my count that adds at least 40ms of latency.

      Oh hang on a mo.

      Looks like the turbo button isn't pressed and my 386 SX/25 was only running at 4MHz.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    6. Re:There's hope yet by fnj · · Score: 1

      Brilliant! Compact and telling. Mod up.

    7. Re:There's hope yet by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They should do that then.

      Something will need to replace ubuntu soon as the easy to use grandma friendly linux desktop. They are hell bent on killing that distribution.

    8. Re:There's hope yet by LoRdTAW · · Score: 1

      Just use Xubuntu then. Since ubuntu 11.something I have liked the interface less and less. Then that unity/gnome 3.0 mess came about and I switched to XFCE until Mate brought back the good ol days of Gnome 2.

    9. Re:There's hope yet by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

    10. Re:There's hope yet by somersault · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because fanboys.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    11. Re:There's hope yet by Ynot_82 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because the userbase for Ubuntu is quite huge comparatively, and Ubuntu seems to like doing shit like this "just because" without any reasoning grounded in fact or reality.

      Sorry, I don't understand the comment.
      Isn't Doing shit, "just because" a fundamental part of OSS software development?
      Do you want to remove the "scratch your own itch" element?

      Quick google says that Mir is GPL V3
      What exactly is the issue here?
      I'm missing something...

    12. Re:There's hope yet by wertigon · · Score: 2

      It's good as long as they use a common interface.

      KDE, Gnome, XFCE and Unity all use the X display server right now.

      However, with this move, some of those will use Wayland, some will use MIR, and some will be able to use both.

      As long as the parts are interchangable - great. But as soon as interfaces change, it's generally bad.

      --
      systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
    13. Re:There's hope yet by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Competition is great where you can run multiple choices in parallel, it's not so great when you can only pick one. I don't know who the heck considers the ALSA/OSS/aRts/PulseAudio/JACK FUBAR a benefit of open source, I see that more as a bad case of not invented here, reinventing the wheel and lack of cooperation, my gold standard for things like that is Linux the kernel which has kept it all together and still makes great progress. The display server is another one of those mutually exclusive choices, it's not like apps that you can run side by side. Progress is fine, but I think everyone here has tasted the bitterness when choices are taken away. The "old" way, the way you wanted to work, the way you actually liked much better than the new way? Gone. No configurability, no classic interface, can't fix, won't fix, not supported, in short suck it up and like it.

      It's a great fallacy to think that people want competition on things that are largely invisible when they do work and a huge PITA when they don't work. When I plug in my speakers or headphones I want sound, when I turn on my Bluetooth keyboard I want it to work, when I turn on wifi I want it to connect and so on and it is not a matter of preference such as with GUIs, it's largely obvious what is meant with working and broken, stable and unstable. I need one stack with a dilligent management that keeps the quality high and integrates the work the community does, warring factions doesn't benefit anyone unless it's a revolt and reformation under new management like xfree86/x.org. I'm glad there's one dominant X implementation and not many.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    14. Re:There's hope yet by DrXym · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    15. Re:There's hope yet by MtHuurne · · Score: 2

      Which highly desirable features are you referring to?

      In case you meant network transparency, X11 doesn't have that anymore either. Sure, you can run xterm remotely with decent performance, but as soon as you start using client-rendered fonts (the only way to get anti-aliasing), gradients or lots of images, performance of X11 becomes so slow that the networking can no longer be considered "transparent". Overall you'll probably get better performance from VNC than from X11.

    16. Re:There's hope yet by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not everything newer is progress. Being able to only use one window at a time is not progress.

    17. Re:There's hope yet by binarylarry · · Score: 1

      What he's saying is "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS?!"

      fuck fuck fuck the slashfilter

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    18. Re:There's hope yet by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It has a critical path which acts as a bottleneck

      Bottleneck to what? High performance rendering has been in the X server for ages now. It gets a direct path to the GPU when such a thing exists.

      and a bunch of crap that nobody uses any more.

      My god the horror. That old line drawing code from the 80's. Sitting all alone, stable and debugged in some source file somewhere. And paged out on disk taking up no resources if it's really not being used.

      And increasingly it has a bunch of extensions trying to work around the framework's deficiencies

      It's amazing, really. In any other system updating the API to have new features is considered a good thing. The bias against X is so strong that even this is taken as a negative.

      which reside in their own processes and increase the render and network latency.

      WTF? The extensions are part of the X server and reside in the X server. If you're talking about the input latency to the compositor then you're full of crap. The IPC latency on a 10 year old Linux desktop is down in the microseconds. You won't notice the 4 extra IPC calls.

      So whatever form Wayland takes the chances are it'll be a damned sight more maintainable than X11.

      Maybe. But the thing is which I find mildly disturbing is that while X11 has many, many defincies, the Wayland folks seem to enjoy making up straw men and picking on things which are easily refutable.

      As I pointed out here and in another post, the latency thing is one of the big lies they keep propagating. Yes it exists, but it is so small that it is negligable. So not a lie, more a half truth which is far more dangerous since it's as deceptive but harder to refute.

      If Wayland is better, it should be better on its merits.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    19. Re:There's hope yet by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1

      What progress does Unity actually bring? New does not mean better.

    20. Re:There's hope yet by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      > Why are two competing display server stacks considered a problem in this case?

      Device drivers. The display server isn't just another piece of user level software. It drives one of the key bits of hardware in the entire system.

      It can quite literally mean the difference between a machine being very respectable or being a doorstop.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    21. Re:There's hope yet by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Quick google says that Mir is GPL V3
      What exactly is the issue here?
      I'm missing something...

      I think the main reason comes down to binary drivers. Neither Nvidia nor ATI have ever released enough specs for a fully capable (ie, respectable 3d support, hardware video decoding, etc) OSS driver to be written. If you actually want to use your video card to its potential you have to use binary drivers.

      Having two competing display servers makes the environment more varied and makes the video card makers less likely to support either (whereas a single option would be more likely to be supported).

      That said, the hardware companies seem to be fairly committed to Wayland over Mir, so I'm guessing that eventually thats what will eventually end up on top.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    22. Re:There's hope yet by jedidiah · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You have no clue what you're talking about.

      VNC is a joke. It can't even manage simple things across a LAN. On the other hand, X can handle media intensive applications under the same conditions.

      X isn't designed well for the WAN but it's an easy enough problem to solve.

      So X runs better across the Internet than VNC does across the LAN.

      Regardless, the X approach to network transparency is now the norm rather than the exception. If you gut Linux in this regard you are putting it at a disadvantage and setting it back 20 years.

      You've got to be very effective at insulating yourself from the world at large if you think otherwise.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    23. Re:There's hope yet by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 1

      I've switched to XFCE as well. Absolutely no problems. I was up and running at my original Gnome2 spped with half an hour. My only issues thus far have been with 13.04. A lot of the XFCE applets stopped working (as they were actually wrapped Gnome 2 applets), and there were themeing issues.

      Personally, I don't care what Ubuntu do anymore. I've spent the last 4 upgrades fixing things they break for no reason and getting rid of horrible UI redesigns. I'm not waiting to see what they've broken in XFCE this time around. I'm moving to Mint on the next upgrade.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    24. Re:There's hope yet by sensei+moreh · · Score: 1

      Compton also works nicely with Lubuntu and the Fedora LXDE spin

      --
      Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
    25. Re:There's hope yet by Ynot_82 · · Score: 1

      I think the main reason comes down to binary drivers

      Ok, this is at least a valid reason.

      I do find it very odd, to say the least, that Canonical is being criticised though.
      The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.

      I just find it an odd state of affairs when a non-copyleft project (Wayland) is favoured over a copyleft project (Mir) because of proprietary drivers.

      Why are we limiting ourselves because of proprietary drivers?
      It's all backward.

      Anyway...

    26. Re:There's hope yet by wjcofkc · · Score: 1

      While I agree XFCE is is pretty wonderful, I have been using Gnome 3.10 for awhile and it really is pretty incredible and very stable. I think it would make for a more appealing modern desktop experience. Past that, TWM would be an improvement over unity.

      --
      Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
    27. Re:There's hope yet by HaZardman27 · · Score: 1

      You're right, because there are no technical details about Windows or OS X, and there is likely never any discussion amongst the developers of those operating systems about the use or inclusion of various software packages in the operating system.

      The only difference here is that a Linux user has access to this information. Most Mac users don't know anything about the Mach BSD kernel or the Quartz compositor, but it doesn't stop them from using the system.

      --
      Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
    28. Re:There's hope yet by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      I can find a single appealing modern desktop.

      Samsung reinvented tiling windows for android! In 2013 they are selling this as a big new feature!

    29. Re:There's hope yet by atomicxblue · · Score: 1

      I'm more afraid of what the Linux certification books will look like by then. They might be 7 volumes, covering each distribution.

    30. Re:There's hope yet by pak9rabid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Maybe. But the thing is which I find mildly disturbing is that while X11 has many, many defincies, the Wayland folks seem to enjoy making up straw men and picking on things which are easily refutable.

      You do realize that "the Wayland folks" and the X11 folks are the same folks, right? Perhaps you should give this a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

    31. Re:There's hope yet by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      ... and a new user is supposed to know what all of this even is, let alone how to install them? Then, once it's installed, they are supposed to realize that "session" actually means "environment" or more newbie-likely "theme" on the login screen?

      (the use of "session" for this is completely braindead IMO, I don't understand how your desktop manager has anything to do with the concept of a session)

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    32. Re:There's hope yet by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      What's with you?

      You come into all these threads claiming you do stuff and people keep telling you you don't. You need to start ignoring the flawed evidence of your eyes and accept the fact that X is bad.

      Just accept it.

      It will make the transition much easier.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    33. Re:There's hope yet by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      X's deficiencies are in its architecture rather than any noticeable performance issues. In many ways its similar to the whole pulse audio thing. The code is going to be much better, provide better capabilities, and introduce a bunch of annoying bugs and other issues along the way.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    34. Re:There's hope yet by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 1

      Actually, Ubuntu's Mir uses Android drivers, doesn't it? Ubuntu having been so focused in mobile and Adreno 3xx GPUs being quite able to render 1080p graphics (I'd love to see a comparison between Adreno 3xx and Intel 3xxx, BTW, to have an idea of where mobile GPUs stand in terms of performance), I can see why they'd go that route, to avoid the trap of ending up with good software but no hardware backers nor drivers. And, as shitty as Unity is for the desktop, it seems to work well on phones.

    35. Re:There's hope yet by DrXym · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My god the horror. That old line drawing code from the 80's. Sitting all alone, stable and debugged in some source file somewhere. And paged out on disk taking up no resources if it's really not being used.

      Yes the horror. It's junk which must be maintained and tested and impedes development of new functionality.

      Maybe. But the thing is which I find mildly disturbing is that while X11 has many, many defincies, the Wayland folks seem to enjoy making up straw men and picking on things which are easily refutable.

      They're not straw men and you didn't refute them so much as pretended that the brokenness didn't matter. Many of the people supporting Wayland are former X11 developers fed up with having to work around broken design. There are some good technical articles describing what is wrong with X11 such as this one.

    36. Re:There's hope yet by RazorSharp · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't Mint be what you're talking about? It's already more grandma-friendly than Ubuntu. Or does it not count since it's based on Ubuntu?

      --
      "From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
    37. Re:There's hope yet by Patch86 · · Score: 1

      The Wayland folks were the X11 folks. X11 doesn't have any folks anymore.

      With a cynic's hat on, Wayland is the new pet project of the guys who used to do X11, and they'll move heaven and earth (including smearing X11) to get people to adopt their shiny new product. It is against their interests for anyone to claim that X11 doesn't need wholesale replacing, or that the replacement should look different to how Wayland looks.

      (With the cynic's hat removed- I honestly don't have an opinion. I'm not close enough to Wayland or Mir, nor a powerful-enough X11 power user to really care one way or the other).

      Canonical claim that Wayland isn't well suited to their view of device interoperability (a view which is fairly unique to them- none of the other distros/DEs are going in the same directions). No idea if that's true (say what you like about Canonical, they've never been prone to telling outright porkies, especially when the code is open for all to see), but if it is- why shouldn't they roll their own? That's what OSS is all about, after all. No reason they should compromise on functionality just so they can support someone else's pet project, if they've got the resources to do otherwise.

      And if you or I don't like it, there's always Mint/Debian/Fedora/whatever. Again, that's the beauty of Linux.

    38. Re:There's hope yet by Teun · · Score: 1

      Why does a discussion about a single distro with unusual ideas about the DE have anything to do with the general health of Linux?

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    39. Re:There's hope yet by Teun · · Score: 3, Insightful
      (First find your bike) and then you should give KDE a go.

      Low on memory, totally configurable, really nice well integrated applications and an interface many people will understand right away.
      As a bonus it has excellent support and future planning.

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    40. Re:There's hope yet by ottothecow · · Score: 1
      Yeah, I switched to Xubuntu a while ago and haven't looked back. Part of it was that my 10" eeepc (my only computer running linux) just couldn't deal anymore with the bloat, but I also didn't like the non-bloaty changes.

      Next step was going to be the xfce flavor of mint...but Xubuntu has been working just fine so I have had no reason to switch. I don't think I am set up on a LTS release, so I might make the switch to mint when the updates stop. The computer is getting pretty long in the tooth though... Bought a new battery and switched to an SSD a while ago which sped it up enough to keep using when I eat breakfast, but websites are getting so filled with javascript that it really struggles. Used to be able to avoid the bloat with flashblock and an ad blocker...but now it's all javascript and html5 junk that I can't turn off without destroying the page functionality. I don't think people realize how much overhead some of those tiebacks to facebook/twitter/etc (for tracking/commenting features) add to their site.

      --
      Bottles.
    41. Re:There's hope yet by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Also, the Qt toolkit is excellent.

    42. Re:There's hope yet by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      You do realize that "the Wayland folks" and the X11 folks are the same folks, right?

      Yes, I certainly mean that. This is what's so disengenuous. They know X11 well enough to know the claims that they are making are very, very dubious. This is one of the things that's so disappointing in the whole affair.

      Don't forget it was also the X11 (and now Wayland) folks who removed the thing to kill active grabs on the grounds that it "shouldn't" be needed. Very user hostile move that.

      For goodness sake, X is badly in need of update/replacement. But, given their attitude to X previously and their propensity to make Wayland look better than X via straw-man arguments, I really do not trust these guys at all.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    43. Re:There's hope yet by armanox · · Score: 1

      For something lighter in the QT world, RazorQT is fantastic. I run Razor + KDE apps.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    44. Re:There's hope yet by armanox · · Score: 1, Insightful

      And the GNOME project was utterly redundant given the existence of KDE....

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    45. Re:There's hope yet by armanox · · Score: 1

      I'm of the opinion that it was time for X12, not a replacement.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    46. Re:There's hope yet by Tailhook · · Score: 1

      There's hope

      I really don't think there is hope. Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth have shown a level of stubbornness and indifference that I don't believe can be explained as a function of any rational thought process. Distrowatch, for what it's worth, has Ubuntu in the #3 spot behind Debian itself during the last six months. Mint is coming up on x2 Ubuntu's hits.

      Ubuntu hasn't hit bottom yet. It is going to have to fall much further before these people get the message, apparently.

      The best thing we can do is continue the ridicule. In the mean time Fedora works fine; there may be hope for Gnome 3 yet. OpenSuse does KDE justice. Mageia also provides a well sorted KDE experience. And the many boutique Linux distros continue to thrive as they always have.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    47. Re:There's hope yet by occasional_dabbler · · Score: 1
      I managed, (after a lot of late night coffee and bad language) to get Kubuntu 13.04 installed on an old PowerMac G5. What amazes me is that even though there isn't even 2D graphics support, KDE Live Plasma Desktop (thanks to Qt) still manages beautiful, smooth desktop effects - even transparency, with little cpu overhead. I have run Enlightenment on PowerPC machines in the past and this was also pretty nice on the eye-candy.

      For me the bigger mistake that Canonical made was to drop official support for Unity 2D (written in Qt) when keeping it as a fallback would have kept a lot of old (mostly PowerPC) machines running a nice OS.

      I wrote the code for the patch to fix Unity 2D's colour rendition on PowerPC (It was an endian problem). I was quite proud of that...

      --
      "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
    48. Re:There's hope yet by occasional_dabbler · · Score: 1
      There's a pretty good correlation between newer and better, at least in technology

      Seriously though, Unity has a steep learning curve but once you're used to it it is a lot better than hierarchical menus. The HUD (click on 'Alt') is very powerful, and customisable, just takes a while.

      --
      "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
    49. Re:There's hope yet by Teun · · Score: 1

      I absolutely concur on Razor being an excellent shot at a light QT based desktop.

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    50. Re:There's hope yet by prefec2 · · Score: 1

      True the compositor stack must be replaced, but most QT or GTK application require just other libraries.

    51. Re:There's hope yet by shadowknot · · Score: 1

      The irony of a product named Unity being the lone DE to use Mir must be lost on Canonical!

    52. Re:There's hope yet by slack_justyb · · Score: 1

      I concur! The ditch of X11 is more political than technical. X11 has become so entrenched within itself that the notion of dropping all of the old crap that gets in the way from making good drivers, is hard to fathom.

      X.org does not equal the X developers alone. X11 was good while it lasted, but it was high time to start developing something for a new generation of developers and devices. X could have been that, but the inertia within the group to change anything was just too much for devs to deal with. Wayland was born out of frustration of old fuddy-duddys who can't get their heads out their ass. Sort of like Microsoft.

      My main beef with Mir is that while it is trying to go after the same ends as Wayland (leaner, more robust, able to be on mobile devices, client handled...) it is born not out of the frustration that X devs had, but simply because Canonical needed to craft their own stack because it was easier for their devs.

      I have heard these calls from the Mir team, that they'll respect other DEs requests, should the Mir team (being completely made up of Canonical) add a patch that breaks a non-Unity DE. However, I don't really buy it. Canonical is trying to deliver a product that can be sold (not the OS but all the services that go with it) and I seriously doubt that when it comes to the Mir team deciding to pull a "feature" from Mir to let GNOME work, or keeping the feature because it helps sell their product, that they'll choose the former over the later. I could be wrong in that the Mir team is all around great people, but at the moment, their stubborn level is about as equal to the GNOME team, and the GNOME people are actually starting to take a few lessons in humility, so that makes the Ubuntu team seem all the worst.

      Wayland is very important because it is an honest attempt by frustrated developers of X to create a nimble, lightweight, portable, and vendor neutral display system. X couldn't be that because X was just to huge to pilot in that direction. Mir is said to be vendor neutral, but it's a super hard sell in the trust department there. I think Canonical has burned a lot of community trust and they really needed a ton of that in order for Mir to succeed. Those who say we should just stick with X are just waiting for us all to doom ourselves to playing massive catch up, when most devices no longer have the ability to run the beast that is X. C'mon, can't we say we learned something from Microsoft?! X is great, but it isn't eternal, and X isn't being used by vendors who use Linux/BSD as their kernels. Google isn't using it, Valve won't be using it... How many more missed chances do we need? We need more attractive options for vendors, thin easy to use display servers needs to be on the OSS platter if we want those vendors sitting at the table with us. Otherwise, we'll just be a bunch of independent Ubuntus floating around trying to get as many shady contracts to make money.

    53. Re:There's hope yet by armanox · · Score: 1

      That's not true. It is the X Windows System, Version 11. It has gone through major revisions over the years, but somehow stopped in the 80s. Also, we somehow ended up with all X.org becoming the only X system people care about - other X servers (XFree86 and XSun, for example) seem to have faded out.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    54. Re:There's hope yet by the_arrow · · Score: 1

      You're mixing your audio solutions. ALSA and OSS are the drivers. aRts and PulseAudio are audio servers and APIs for applications to play sound if the don't want to use the drivers directly. And JACK is to chain multiple applications together in an audio-processing chain.

      --
      / The Arrow
      "How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
    55. Re:There's hope yet by somersault · · Score: 1

      The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.

      You mean those hardware vendors who pay to license other vendors' proprietary technology, and aren't allowed to open source the parts of the code that have been licensed from elsewhere?

      Why are we limiting ourselves because of proprietary drivers?

      Why are you limiting yourself to open source drivers?

      --
      which is totally what she said
    56. Re:There's hope yet by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      I think you need to update your sarcasm filters.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    57. Re:There's hope yet by hobarrera · · Score: 1

      Because Ubuntu has no real reason to develop Mir, and it's a huge waste of resources.
      Most of the *nix world is backing up Wayland as a replacement for X, and Cannonical, with no actual justification, went it's own way to develop Mir. This means porting things like gtk, qt, etc, etc over to Mir. It also means that porting software to/from Ubuntu is now a bit more complicated.

      While there are thing where you benefit from variety (ie: music player, paint app), some things just add overhead, with no actual benefit for those who pick either X or Y.

    58. Re:There's hope yet by hobarrera · · Score: 1

      Not really. Gnome was an alternative, and could run software designed for KDE just fine. No extra effort was necesary to port each application (as happens with Wayland/Mir).

    59. Re:There's hope yet by hobarrera · · Score: 1

      It's not about feature, it's about X being unmaintanable, huge, and impossible to understand.
      This video is extremely insightful, and quite worth watching.

    60. Re:There's hope yet by aestrivex · · Score: 1

      Hi, Linux mint just called. They want their anonymity back.

    61. Re:There's hope yet by Admiral_Bob2000 · · Score: 1

      I do wish browsers would offer a built-in live resources monitor/rationing for their JavaScript engines (e.g. a display similar to the "top" command) so you could easily identify the pages that are running excessive amounts of JS, and rate-limit* each website (or have global "ulimit" style settings), and also kill JS execution on a particular page only if needed.

      *e.g. tell your browser to restrict resource usage of JS code from untrusted sites so they can only animate at, say 1Hz, or only use 5% CPU max, or only post back xkB amount of AJAX per minute (if you're trying to conserve bandwidth).

      That way you don't get lumbered with the perils of bloated JS from incompetent programmers running amok with useless animations, and poorly coded algorithms that should be, say, O(NlogN) but end up as O(N^2) - but still have sites needing minimal JS for usability reasons (e.g. form auto-complete/correction/validation) able to run, without constantly having to update your NoScript-style blacklist/whitelist.

      After all, it's my electricity they're consuming (I'm trying to keep my PC's consumption low), and given the rate local electricity prices are rising here (Australia), maybe I should ask the site owners to chip in to my power bill if they continue to insist on me executing their frivolous JS ?

  2. Christ... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X' project to have "multi-monitor issues"?

    I can be sympathetic to the weirdness sometimes experienced in that area with classic X, given that it's a hoary design from the age when 'multi-monitor' meant "Computer that costs more than everybody in front of it" bodged and genetic-drifted into a totally alien environment; but this is the future, the one where you are hard pressed to buy a motherboard without at least two built-in video outputs, not infrequently more, you'd think that that would be a major consideration in any new graphics system design.

    1. Re:Christ... by Chrisq · · Score: 2

      Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X' project to have "multi-monitor issues"?I

      The thing is that Weyland is just as mobile friendly as Mir: The freedesktop site says: "The Weston compositor is a minimal and fast compositor and is suitable for many embedded and mobile use cases".

    2. Re:Christ... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X'

      Not even that. Maemo/Meego which by all accounts were slick and responsive used X. You could even change the window manager if you liked, since it was standard X.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    3. Re:Christ... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      There isn't anything necessarily incompatible with 'mobile' use and multi-monitor use (indeed, many contemporary mobile devices have both a screen and a video-out, and some of them can even treat them both independently, rather than the video-out being a fixed mirror of the screen); but, as a matter of priorities (not of actual technical conflicts) the fashion for 'mobile' seems to have led to some remarkably shoddy treatment of multi-monitor scenarios being allowed to ship on desktop/laptop OSes. Not just Ubuntu, either. The UI-formerly-known-as-'Metro' shipped supporting 'apps' only on the primary monitor (WTF, guys? You built explicit support for multiple-apps 'tiling'/'snapping' and didn't allow that behavior to be used across multiple monitors?) and Apple just slapped a grey background wallpaper across your second monitor if you fullscreened anything until either 10.7 or 10.8.

      My point was not that the two are technologically incompatible in any way; but that a focus on 'What Would iPads Do?' design seems to be leading to solid support for additional displays, and coherent integration into the UI of that possibility, being ignored.

      It's weird because all this is happening just as multiple output support is solidly moving down into even the cheapest and nastiest computers (we can't even buy boring Dell typingboxes with support for less than three heads at work these days) and monitors have never been cheaper....

    4. Re:Christ... by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      Even in 10.7 you can't extend a single wallpaper across two monitors. You can cut to images from one larger picture yourself and make it look like one wallpaper, or have the same one twice. Both of which would be fine in 1999, but not in 2013.

    5. Re:Christ... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Good thing that OSX is Naturally Superior for photoshop-wielding 'creatives' so they can handle doing that manually.

      And wasn't Apple the company with the reputation for delivering remotely-usable-by-people-who-are-neither-uber-geeks-nor-UNIX-workstation-buyers multi-monitor support atypically early in the game, somtime back in the classic era?

    6. Re:Christ... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      Even in 10.7 you can't extend a single wallpaper across two monitors. You can cut to images from one larger picture yourself and make it look like one wallpaper, or have the same one twice. Both of which would be fine in 1999, but not in 2013.

      You can't do it in Windows easily either - you have to stitch two wallpapers together in the right order for your monitor configuration. Of course, there are tools to do this, but that's what they do in the background. Though not all of them do it "right", especially when a monitor is to the left of the primary (which means that monitor gets "negative coordinates" as top-left of the primary is (0,0), so the left monitor gets negative X values).

    7. Re:Christ... by daboochmeister · · Score: 1

      Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X' project to have "multi-monitor issues"?

      Neither. One of the things being glossed over or ignored by most of the discussion here is that Mir is working absolutely fine (including with multiple monitors). The issue causing them to "undefault" Mir is that XMir is not as complete and stable as they would like when apps that require X11 try to operate in multi-monitor mode (XMir is a compatibility layer between Mir and X).

      In other words, the "weirdness sometimes experience in that area with classic X" in fact IS the problem, or at least the major contributing factor. Their compatibility layer isn't handling all the weirdness edge-cases.

      So if you have a single monitor, or don't plan on using any X apps across monitors, feel free to install Mir/XMir and move on. It's being made optional, not going away.

      --
      "Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh ... never mind." Dave Bucci
    8. Re:Christ... by kermidge · · Score: 1

      Mod up. He gets the article.

  3. X is X by deviated_prevert · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Like Pulse audio it takes a long time to make a WM that does not have some serious issues somewhere. Ubuntu choosing to try to create a WM more suitable to the Unity gui is understandable. But it is no small task. This is the great part about the Linux kernel not a weakness as the nay sayers that peddle the poison crap that Linux distros are too fragmented. Unlike the alternative which is only united by the fact that with a Windows or Apple window manager you have NO CHOICE PERIOD.

    Ubuntu is stable and very usable always with the window manager that they choose, so is Slackware, Knoppix, Mint etc etc etc. The detractors and shills do not realize the real significance of this. Which is the fact that different groups can do what they want as witness the Google WM on top of the kernel. Shills that harp that fragmentation there is a problem are starting to be exposed for what they are as witness the fact that Android is kicking but all over the planet.

    --
    This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
    1. Re:X is X by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      Has pulse ever gotten to that point?

      Maybe they should first get rid of Unity. It sucks. It assumes you have one app open at a time, so there is no one step way to pick the 4th window of some application you have. It hates tons of apps like Rdesktop. You get a ? for an icon and if you dare open more than one you again have no way to select a single one. Tiling window managers are more useful.

    2. Re:X is X by stewsters · · Score: 1

      In the version with 13.04 you can click the program icon again, and it hides other windows and pops up all the windows under that application. It makes it 2 clicks, but . There is some weirdness if you have the window in a different workspace, but its not to bad. I have seen a system like this on a OSX a few years ago, I don't remember what they called it (expose?). The part with the question mark icons annoys me, they should do something about that.

    3. Re:X is X by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      Maybe they should first get rid of Unity. It sucks. It assumes you have one app open at a time, so there is no one step way to pick the 4th window of some application you have.

      You can click the application icon again and then it shows a thumbnail gallery of all the app's windows.

    4. Re:X is X by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      Which adds another step! and obscures my view of my current desktop!
      What wonderful progress.

    5. Re:X is X by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

      What they should do is simply get rid of it.

      It also breaks focus follows mouse. It is not elegant with multiple work spaces, it makes it a pain to use multiple windows at the same time.

    6. Re:X is X by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

      Personally, I haven't had a problem with pulseaudio for a couple years -- after having endless problems before that.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
  4. Big cudos for trying! by zuse · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Big cudos for trying! by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 2

      RedHat isn't the only Wayland supporter. Its more like Canonical is supporting Mir, and everyone else is working on Wayland.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    2. Re:Big cudos for trying! by razman47 · · Score: 1

      I'm not after fun. I'm after functionality and stability. There are way too many cases of half-assed components being implemented in Linux (particularly desktop-focused distros) because they're new and fresh, but are pushed onto people during official releases before they've had enough time to mature, just to satisfy some arbitrary 6-moth release schedule (looking at you Ubuntu).

      Fun is nice when you're in the mood to play around with things. But eventually when the stress hits, we just want to be able to get down and rely on the system to throw up some new and weird edge case condition we aren't able to diagnose because someone's pet project became part of the distro.

  5. If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Go and try Debian. There is a reason why they have a huge following and most of what people like in Ubuntu is there in debian with none of what people dislike.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I can't wait to start using the new and exciting Gnome 3.4!

    2. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Debian's conventions are good for servers, but for desktops...

      "experimental" means "testing"
      "testing" means "stable"
      "stable" means "old"

    3. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      no, while a great server distro Debian does not put the thought and effort to make the common Linux dekstop components work together, it's a ragged mess that needs hours of manual fixing. other distros derived from Debian DO put in the effort so things have some hope of being configured to work together.

      Debian desktop is a huge waste of time.

    4. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by occasional_dabbler · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Personally I DO like Canonical's direction. I see exactly the same kind of ill-informed hate on /. for Unity that I see for Metro, and from the same people who've not spent more than a few hours using them (and starting with a negative attitude at that.)

      Unity is an amazing product, it is visually beautiful, my Mac uber-fanboy flatmate was fascinated by it and it's perfectly obvious to a 'granny' that you click on the buttons to make stuff happen and they soon get the hang that you click on the top button to find stuff.

      The real beauty of Unity though is how it works for power users with the keyboard. How many of you know about click/hold the super key? How many know about the HUD? Click on Alt in any app and see what happens. Unity at the start was a pure desktop solution, the touch stuff was added later because a lot of the ideas translated . Once you get used to it it is brilliant

      I've pretty much always had a Linux box somewhere in my den but only yesterday I set up my new, main dev machine as pure Ubuntu 13.10 booting from UEFI off a SSD and running Mir

      If it weren't for Canonical making Ubuntu such a polished distro I would probably be dual-booting Win7 or 8 and some-other-linux and mostly only ever booting to Windows.

      --
      "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
    5. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by occasional_dabbler · · Score: 1

      The whole point of Ubuntu was to make Debian work in the real world. By and large they succeeded.

      --
      "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
    6. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by razman47 · · Score: 1

      Ubuntu has some major advantages though:

      * Software - the software in Debian repos, even with testing/unstable repos are not recent enough for my liking. Sure, the Ubuntu repositories don't always get updated with the latest versions of stuff, but that's what PPAs are for.

      * PPAs - as above, but also to provide easy access to software that's not in the official repositories to begin with.

      * Font rendering - Debian, due to issues with patents or some other legal concern, does not have proper sub-pixel rendering on fonts like Ubuntu does. Some people don't mind this, but sub-pixel rendering is amazingly useful for improved font quality. Microsoft might have ditched it for Windows 8/Office 2013, but they're throwing the desktop under a bus anyway and don't care if things render crap anymore, but I still care.

      * Community - the Ubuntu community is full of fanboys and morons who don't know much if anything about Linux itself, but there's a definite benefit in having that userbase when things go wrong or you need help with something. Windows has a program and solution for every task/problem - the massive userbase is an extremely large reason for that.

      Having said that, Debian would be perfect for me if I wanted to tailor a distro for an embedded system, one that wouldn't need the benefits listed above and was focused on specific tasks. If I ever get around to building an Iron Man suit, the OS will be running Debian I can assure you. :)

    7. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by intermodal · · Score: 1

      Wait, you're calling people ill-informed for hating something many of us have tried? I tried Ubuntu, and hated Unity. I don't like what Canonical is doing to it in general with the new store-like system. And I definitely don't like the unresponsiveness of Canonical when they face practical and reasonable opposition in these kinds of changes from their userbase.

      That said, there are things I do like about Ubuntu. It's LiveCD is fairly functional for limited use (even though I hate the interface, usually all I need is a terminal and browser when I need a Live Linux), its installer is good, and its selection of keyboards for system-wide use is one of the broadest I have found, as many do not have an easy option for those of us who prefer a system-wide (including console) us altgr-intl keyboard. The number of packages available is good, and the ability to switch to a new UI is ok.

      That said, I always find myself missing portage and hating the way services and configurations are run. So even with the handful of perks and the ability to circumvent the worst of Ubuntu's problems, I always find myself back in the Gentoo/Funtoo world.

      --
      In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
    8. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      no, they missed. Linux Mint makes Ubuntu work in the real world

    9. Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... by yenic · · Score: 1

      Personally I DO like Canonical's direction. I see exactly the same kind of ill-informed hate on /. for Unity that I see for Metro, and from the same people who've not spent more than a few hours using them (and starting with a negative attitude at that.)

      Unity is an amazing product, it is visually beautiful, my Mac uber-fanboy flatmate was fascinated by it and it's perfectly obvious to a 'granny' that you click on the buttons to make stuff happen and they soon get the hang that you click on the top button to find stuff.

      The real beauty of Unity though is how it works for power users with the keyboard. How many of you know about click/hold the super key? How many know about the HUD? Click on Alt in any app and see what happens. Unity at the start was a pure desktop solution, the touch stuff was added later because a lot of the ideas translated . Once you get used to it it is brilliant

      I've pretty much always had a Linux box somewhere in my den but only yesterday I set up my new, main dev machine as pure Ubuntu 13.10 booting from UEFI off a SSD and running Mir

      If it weren't for Canonical making Ubuntu such a polished distro I would probably be dual-booting Win7 or 8 and some-other-linux and mostly only ever booting to Windows.

      Pretty much what occasional_dabbler said ^

      He's right. While I'm onboard with the idea of Unity as well, and appreciate Ubuntu a lot. I really haven't found another Linux distro that I prefer over it, even though it is hard to not let the masses collective hatred for it influence me...

      But I am guilty a bit in my own mind about Metro hating without trying it. I don't run around posting it sucks, never have, because I've never used it outside of a store. Yet I assume it sucks based on others' opinions, and I avoid it. Not that I'm crazy about continually giving MS my money anyway. But still, I'm definitely guilty of disliking Metro without even trying it. That's a shame on me really and something this post has caused me to realize.

      I'm not sure I'd be so enthusiastic about MIR though, I'm OK with whatever Canonical makes default. As long as everything works with it flawlessly who cares. I'm a little concerned that Canonical took a big diversion into mobile like MS has, instead of taking the Win8 opportunity to advance further into the enterprise space. They took their eye off the ball the last time they had this opportunity too, in the Vista days. Though I'm definitely mostly interested in FirefoxOS and UbuntuMobile than I am iOS/Android. The latter products aren't my cup o tea.
      In general though, I like Canonical's direction, and as long as they keep Ubuntu working as well as it is I won't be joining the angry mob. Just having a stable, painless Linux distro. :) That never harmed anyone, and it sure is welcome.

      --
      http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-slashdot-account Stop visiting Slashdot.
  6. Re:You're wrong, at least for my use-case by MtHuurne · · Score: 1

    Some years ago I tried using KDE3 from a machine on the same floor, using Exceed and a win32 build of Xorg as the X servers. If I disabled rounded window corners and picked a theme without gradients, it was somewhat usable, but not as responsive as I'd like (this was my main dev box). I ended up switching to NX, which worked very well for me.

  7. Oh Cononical by wjcofkc · · Score: 1

    I understand where they think Wayland falls short, but rather than going off and trying to create there own display server, they could have instead contributed the functionality they wanted to the Wayland project. And if Wayland wouldn't want it, fork a version of Wayland that is compatible but has what they felt was missing.

    --
    Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
    1. Re:Oh Cononical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      What the fuck do think Mir is? Ubuntu took a bunch (maybe most) of Wayland and started adding the their Mir stuff. IOW, they did exactly as you suggested they should do. The also did it for the reason you mentioned about not getting their patches approved. Seriously, go check the Wayland mailing list archives and read some of the hostile comments by other (particularly Red Hat) Wayland devs made to Canonical devs. It's hard to believe these guys are regarded as professionals.

  8. Re:You're wrong, at least for my use-case by armanox · · Score: 1

    That's due to issues with the win32 versions of X in my experience. I use an IBM 600E (Pentium 2 with 96MB RAM running Red Hat 9) as a remote X client to a lot of systems without issue (XDMCP to Solaris, IRIX, and Linux).

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  9. Re:Chromebook by Wing_Zero · · Score: 2

    I recently worked on a Laptop for a friend that I had to create a new user and copy all the prefs and files over.

    it kinda amazed me that all there was to move was the bookmarks. no photos, no documents, not even anything in the downloads folder! this laptop was about a year and a half old and basically stock.

    The only thing she really did was print recipes and joke email.

    So the only thing I would say is that the Printing support in ChromeOS is crappy by design.
    "Buy a cloud printer" doesnt really do it for me.

    Other than that, Sure

  10. Block social recommendation from resolving by tepples · · Score: 1

    I don't think people realize how much overhead some of those tiebacks to facebook/twitter/etc (for tracking/commenting features) add to their site.

    Have them block the social recommendation crap from resolving using a hosts file, and they'll realize when they see how much faster pages load. I think APK is on to something.

    1. Re:Block social recommendation from resolving by ottothecow · · Score: 1

      I haven't looked into it too much, but can you block this crap but still be able to use the services that are connected to them? (i.e. can I block facebook/twitter integrations in hosts but then still use facebook/twitter directly without issue?)

      --
      Bottles.
  11. xubuntu-desktop installed fine. Cannot reproduce. by tepples · · Score: 1

    The best part of trying to change your desktop environment on Ubuntu is how it then tries to uninstall your entire operating system. busybox, the linux kernel, and everything else.

    I didn't see that misbehavior when I switched from Unity to Xfce by typing sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop back in the 11.10 days.

  12. When the HW vendors license others' patents by tepples · · Score: 1

    The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.

    Or, just as likely, the upstream patent holders who prohibit the hardware vendors from providing open drivers.

  13. Qt wasn't free software by tepples · · Score: 1

    When the GNOME project began, Qt wasn't free software. Therefore, GNOME 1 wasn't redundant among free X11 desktop environments.

    1. Re:Qt wasn't free software by armanox · · Score: 1

      QT was 'free' at that point in time, with the stipulation that should it ever become non-free the last free version would be forever open.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  14. Government shutdown by tepples · · Score: 1
    Anonymous Coward wrote:

    I'll never badmouth a group for delaying a release when the product isn't done yet.

    Not even a product with a strict deadline, like an annual budget for the national government?

  15. Paging granularity by tepples · · Score: 1

    [Old X11 cruft is] paged out on disk taking up no resources if it's really not being used

    Not if your computer doesn't use a paging file. (It's common for handheld devices not to use one because of NAND flash wear considerations.) And not if the old X11 cruft happens to have been placed in the same 4 KiB page as a heavily used part of the code.

  16. Not running maximized? You're "holding it wrong":p by tepples · · Score: 1
    h4rr4r wrote:

    Maybe they should first get rid of Unity. It sucks. It assumes you have one app open at a time [...] Tiling window managers are more useful.

    I thought we already established in the thread about Slashdot's new layout that most people maximize one window to fill the screen and don't use tiling window managers. For example: "Low-level creatures like us can only read one webpage at a time. It makes a lot more sense for us to have one window open and some of us prefer that window to be fullscreen." I mentioned that people could keep two web pages side by side, and people reacted as if Steve Jobs had told them they were "holding it wrong".

  17. Re:Chromebook by Rich0 · · Score: 1

    Yeah, they really need to offer a cloud printer box or something. It would interface via USB/network/whatever to the printer, and would connect in to cloud print. Config would all be via the web - perhaps via Google's website (you plug in the device, it does dhcp and registers with Google, and then you log into google cloud print and register the device using its serial number or whatever). I have an Ecobee thermostat that was registered in a similar way - you just configure the thermostat itself enough to get it on the LAN, and then you can do most of the rest via their website.

    Only issue will be dealing with the myriad of driver issues, which is probably what is keeping Google away from it. However, at the very least they could support network-based PS printers, or a few other well-defined protocols. My current printer is postscript and it took all of about 3min to get it working on linux, and this is not on one of those super-desktop-friendly distros.

  18. GNOME is 10 months older than free Qt by tepples · · Score: 1

    You're thinking of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which didn't come about until June 1998 (source). It was under a GPL-incompatible license until Qt/X11 was released sometime in 2000. (The archived press release appears to have vanished in the transition from Nokia to Digia.) GNOME began in August 1997, and this article from September 2000 states that it was explicitly to work around the non-free status of Qt at the time.

  19. Re:Chromebook by madcat_sun · · Score: 1

    I think the use of grandma friendly its an error. It must be affordable to work whih everyone that needs or wants to. I dont say its a no good thing the chromium os, but I dont think it fits everyone needs , or it can take other approachs to do the same. Imagine this, a user with limited/low bandwith that expects to work with a chromium terminal..and needs to work now. Well, you are gonna to tell , there is little users in this side, but there is. And think of the say , its not wise to put all the eggs in the same basket (or like it must be saying in english) It recalls me of the time I was working in the it and we were selling machines with light versions of * linux distro , and then for ripping a cd you had to download the whole gnome 2 files over 28.8kbps. Greetings!!!

  20. Library by tepples · · Score: 1

    a user with limited/low bandwith

    I think the idea is that people living where the only affordable home Internet access is dial-up would carry the Chromebook to a branch of the county library to do large data transfers.

    there is little users in this side

    Other Slashdot users have repeatedly told me that people with niche needs need to suck it up and accept that products and services that lack economies of scale will have inflated prices. The cliche they use is "You are an edge case."