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Ex-Red Hat Employee Matthew Garrett Comments On the State of XMir
First time accepted submitter slack_justyb writes "Matthew Garrett, former employee of Red Hat, comments on the current state of XMir and Canonical's recent decision to not ship XMir as the default display server in Ubuntu 13.10. Noting the current issues outstanding in XMir, the features yet to be implemented, the security loopholes, and Intel's recent rejection to support Mir in general. All of this leading Garrett to the conclusion that 'It's clear that XMir has turned into a larger project than Canonical had originally anticipated, but that's hardly surprising.'"
Do you know of any actual popularity statistics? Pretty much every "non-techie" Linux user I know runs Ubuntu, and quite a lot of the techies too. That's not representational of course, and some real hard numbers would be interesting.
Seconded. Even though many long-time users are switching to Mint or similar, I believe that Ubuntu still commands the lions share of the linux-on-desktop-or-laptop market.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It boots on post-1990s hardware, so signs point to "yes".
Do you see its name on this website ? http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html These are the only free distros
Who is going to run X, Mir, Wayland, or fucking SurfaceFlinger on a web server or router? You don't run any desktop environment on those systems.
Still suffering from the butthurt he got when Ubuntu sided with Scott James Remnant over him in a technical dispute which then led to MG quitting like a petulant little bitch. Just like what happen when he was with Debian. Now he just takes to shitting on Canonical whenever he can. The fact is, Canonical is concentrating on getting Ubuntu Touch ready and with the technical difficulties with XMir, and made the prudent decision not to dump it as a default on the Ubuntu user base.
BTW, the while he may not work for Red Hat, he's still on the fedora advisory board. Can somebody say "conflict of interest"?
This discussion is obviously about the Linux Desktop, you fuck wit.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I find the XMir situation unfortunate. I switched to Ubuntu this past year for a clean, nice font, supported linux distro. Hopefully, this will not be the start of the end of Ubuntu.
Yes, I could go Mint, Debian, etc... I still like the fact that there is a company behind the download - its a trust issue. I know it's all opensource so I can see the code, but let' be real, who's got the time to read each line...
Maybe back to OpenSUSE.
FTFA:
Mir could have done the same, but doesn't because of a conscious design decision - in the Ubuntu Phone world, clients stop doing things when they're told to. Ubuntu Desktop is expected to behave the same way.
So they're letting design decisions for their phone interface dictate how they implement their desktop interface. It's the same stupidity that the Gnome developers are engaged in. A desktop is not "just another kind of phone," and if you treat your primary users as second-class citizens, they'll all jump ship.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Kill yourself?
Don't you mean 'Free' not free?
Ubuntu is Steam's reference platform so that's hardly surprising.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> I consider myself a power user and was horrified of the Dash and other things. AFter using those for awhile,
The dash is a solution in search of a problem.
It is something that should be an optional extra rather than the sole thing that is forced on you with older interfaces being sabotaged by unnecessary architectural decisions.
"You will like it eventually if it's forced on you" is hardly a compelling argument.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I think the distro to watch is PuppyOS. Talk about easy to use... and it can run on just about anything.
It's still missing features
XMir doesn't support colour profiles. XRandR properties aren't exposed, so there's no way to control TV output encoding or overscan. There's still no hardware cursor support. Switching to XMir now would reduce functionality without providing any user-visible gain.
no hardware cursor support? talk about a dealbreaker!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
X is nice in that it is sort-of network transparent, but now that RDP can do it's magic at the application level, it's probably worth going that route. X can be very, very slow over a typical DSL or cable connection if using anything more complicated than an xterm. RDP can do a whole Windows desktop over the same connection with a lot more responsiveness. Heck, even VNC beats X on lower speed connections, but I've never seen an application-level implementation of that.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I ran precisely one Ubuntu server, but they compiled Apache with some fucked up options and it would not, no matter what I did, run one of my PHP sites. In frustration, I through Debian on another machine, and it worked fine. At that point I decided never to try Ubuntu on a server again, and since then I've basically dumped it entire.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The company I currently work for has several thousand servers all running Ubuntu Server, which in turn is running OpenStack and the supporting infrastructure.
Ubuntu is what you use if you want to use Debian but need commercial support (and yes, we have made use of that support on several occasions)
Of course in the case of a router, or web server, the question is why someone would want to use VNC or X to configure it. It would make more sense in either case to build a web based UI and shove all the rendering out to the client in their web browser.
My webserver is currently running ubuntu (server edition without X), could someone please clarify why that makes me an idiot?
Most of the websites (and db servers) I've created for my company are Ubuntu Server... I don't deal with heavy security implications because they are all internally facing, although the ports are locked up and we haven't had any problems, and while I don't pay that much attention, I haven't heard of Ubuntu Server being any less secure than other linux distributions.
No X Server, go gui at all, and no need for one.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I still like the fact that there is a company behind the download - its a trust issue
you just blew my mind.
We are cycling around a wheel of and racing to reinvention. All of Canonical's efforts could have been paired up with Wayland to make a one-size-fits-all display server and it probably would have been finished and ready to deploy by this point. It's opposition like Mir that is stagnating much needed innovation. I imagine Canonical's thoughts going something like "Oh, since Wayland isn't moving fast enough - even though it's been in development for years - we'll just make our own, from scratch." If they didn't think it'd cost them this much effort, then they're more arrogant than I thought. The one thing about them I've learned over the years is they love biting off more than they can chew - only to spit it right back out onto the plate. If there is one positive thing to come out of this is that it lit a fire under Wayland's butt.
Many people unfortunately.
In frustration, I through Debian on another machine
I through Debian threw the window. sheesh... facepalm. Where did all you third graders come from? You THREW Debian on it, moron.
A number of people also use Linux Mint and Debian, especially since 2011/2012 when Ubuntu fucked up pretty badly with Unity.
You mean like Gnome 2.xx? Go ahead and try, see how far you get. Even trying to install the MATE fork results in a multitude of breakage all over the system, because of dependencies related to the increasingly ironic "Unity" desktop.
I've been looking for a replacement to Ubuntu for a while now and have begun moving on to Debian as a result with frequent stops here and there to try out other distros to see if any come close to working as well for me as earlier versions of Ubuntu did. So far the only one which does is Debian and even then there's all sorts of stuff that I have to relearn while missing the way Ubuntu used to handle it...
So yeah, 'forced' is an apt description. I (and many others) have been forced to make a decision between keeping our Gnome 2.xx desktop and Ubuntu. Sadly unlike those who still cling to Windows XP those of us who use Linux are unable to simply use the older versions because of how quickly bitrot sets in and how difficult it becomes to install applications.
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
Can you link me to a how-to? I have no luck just using ssh compression, I think you need something like jpeg.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's clear that XMir has turned into a larger project than Canonical had originally anticipated, but that's hardly surprising.
Isn't "something you didn't anticipate" almost the defintion of "a surprise"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Try either FreeNX/NX or X2GO for the equivalent of RDP.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
FreeNX is like magic compared to ssh -C, but it's decidedly not plain old X - it's conceptually the same kind of thing as RDP, but more tailored to X directly. Still - caching and compression on a wrapper to X. I wish my admin would put it on our boxes. I stopped following NX after they went closed-source, so thanks for the link to X2GO - it looks like they carry the torch for open source NX now.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.