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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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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"