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