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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.'"

19 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:XMir is dead. by kthreadd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:XMir is dead. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Poor Mattthew Garrett by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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"?

    1. Re:Poor Mattthew Garrett by segedunum · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I never liked him ever since I saw the way he started outright glorifying 'Secure Boot' and how there would be no problem with Microsoft being gatekeeper.

      As for Mir, forking away is not a great thing to see but Canonical have the right to do it.

    2. Re:Poor Mattthew Garrett by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm glad we can just attack the messenger, and ignore the message.

    3. Re:Poor Mattthew Garrett by mjg59 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I stopped working on Ubuntu because decisions were increasingly being made internally rather than anywhere that volunteer contributors could influence them. The "Click here to instantly break your mouse" thing was just the final straw. There's a component to the story that involves beer and a hilarious reply vs. reply all error on an iPhone, but I don't remember it being about anyone siding with Scott - there's a picture somewhere of me deactivating my Ubuntu membership a few minutes after sending https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-February/025141.html , which hardly gave them time to.

  4. Re:XMir is dead. by binarylarry · · Score: 2

    This discussion is obviously about the Linux Desktop, you fuck wit.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  5. "Ubuntu Phone" by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:"Ubuntu Phone" by krammit · · Score: 2

      This is about the behavior of the display server, not the user interface. So no, this has nothing to do with using a unified interface for different form factors.

      Deep breath. Exhale.

      You're welcome.

      --
      "Watch your cornhole, bud."
    2. Re:"Ubuntu Phone" by DrXym · · Score: 2

      I think it would be very useful if I could stuff a phone or tablet into a dock and suddenly I have a full blown desktop. I think Microsoft and Ubuntu are far better placed to deliver this than either Apple or Google are although technically there is no reason that stops any of them doing it.

  6. Re:Firmware by aesiamun · · Score: 2

    Don't you mean 'Free' not free?

  7. Re:XMir is dead. by jedidiah · · Score: 2

    Ubuntu is Steam's reference platform so that's hardly surprising.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  8. Re:Baah not this crap again by jedidiah · · Score: 2

    > 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.
  9. Re:XMir is dead. by Charliemopps · · Score: 2

    I think the distro to watch is PuppyOS. Talk about easy to use... and it can run on just about anything.

  10. the woes of XMir by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  11. Re:Uh yeah by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  12. Re:XMir is dead. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Who runs an Ubuntu web server? Or router?

    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)

  13. Re:Uh yeah by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The same is true of VNC. Just because a machine has no display, or even display hardware doesn't mean it can't listen on a port and shove bitmaps down it.

    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.

  14. Re:XMir is dead. by quadrox · · Score: 2

    My webserver is currently running ubuntu (server edition without X), could someone please clarify why that makes me an idiot?